Engaging the Digital Child with the Wonders of Nature, e-Science and the Outdoors

This project aims to understand how digital technology orients children toward both indoor and outdoor play, and how to design technologies that: nurture children’s interest and affinity to nature; support creative engagement with nature; and enable problem solving about nature and the environment with computational thinking. Children increasingly play indoors and some grow to be adults who largely avoid going outdoors. Through ethnographic and co-design research with children from Foundation to Year 3, we will develop a framework of understanding of orientation to outdoor play and co-design tools to expand children’s nature engagement and participation in e-science.

This project currently supports two PhD projects led by Chimi Om and Yanxia Li.

Chimi’s project aims to understand how technology orients children toward outdoor play and learning. Through ethnographic and co-design research with children, Chimi is exploring the potential of emerging technology designs and new research methods to support, educate and promote children’s skills towards understanding and acting towards environmental sustainability. Chimi hopes to develop a framework or/and co-design tools to expand children’s nature engagement and developing problem solving skills.

Yanxia’s project aims to explore how digital technologies can be designed to facilitate children’s (re)connection with nature, people, and place in their local food systems. This study will lay the groundwork for fostering environments that enhance children’s learning and stronger connections through digitally supported sustainable food practices.

Completed research studies include:

• Wired, wild, wonderful: A scoping review of early childhood nature connections fostered by digital technologies. This review argues for more granular reporting of child participation and procedures, and increased engagement with theory and nature connection frameworks. It identifies design opportunities including technologies that engage children’s creativity and imagination in the outdoors, relational technologies for use in families and educational contexts, and ones that build their sense of competence and contribution in collective efforts to care for nature.
• Rethinking the Development of Computational Thinking Skills in Young Children through Nature Play. This paper suggests rethinking how computational thinking skills are developed in early childhood education, by suggesting that children can learn these skills outdoors through nature play. Learning computational thinking skills outdoors can foster nature connection in young children and allows them to understand environmental problems without compromising their joyful experiences in nature. The paper also presents design opportunities for environmental sustainability with young children.