Educated Child Program

Learning and playing in digital worlds

About

How do we harness digital technologies to optimise learning and access to knowledge through active interactions and development of engaging and thought-provoking technologies?

Our Educated Child program aims to advance understandings of how children in diverse communities participate in digital learning and explore how participation might engage with curriculum guidelines and educational and learning practices. We’ll use these understandings to develop models, frameworks, technology innovations and good practices of digital learning that build children’s educational opportunities, to foster inclusiveness and equitable outcomes.

Approach

  • immersive multimodal approaches that capture children’s detailed and nuanced interactions with a range of digital devices, including tablets and other digital learning resources
  • testing the efficacy of digital learning models and resources through experiments, video ethnographies, eye tracking of learning strategies, and learning interventions
  • co-research and collaborate with children on a range of issues, including the co-design of new technologies
  • actively involve children who face a range of opportunities and challenges across regional, rural and urban contexts

Impact

Policy

  • recommendations on digital technology access and digital proficiency for young children
  • wide-scale curriculum change recommendations to transform learning with digital technologies in the early years

Innovation

  • frameworks to support the design of new technologies for learning, learning applications and other practical technologies, including in STEM and literacy

Practice

  • guidelines for assessing children’s digital content, products, services, and experiences
  • resources for educators to support children’s digital interactions

Key programs

Learning in diverse settings

  • investigate the uses of digital technology within a family context across diverse settings
  • explore how children learn by using digital technologies across a wide range of informal and formal learning settings (for example, at home, in playgroup and childcare, museums, libraries and schools)

Digital technology design to inform learning

  • design new technologies that are scalable and affordable to support early childhood curriculum and foster interactions in educational settings, including in face-to-face and distance modes
  • collaborate with children, teachers and parents in technology design and implementation
  • focus on aspects of curriculum and pedagogy in early childhood classrooms and other learning spaces

Active learning and play in digital worlds

  • investigate children’s engagement with digital technologies that shape creativity, curiosity, inquiry, problem solving, and knowledge production to support curriculum and pedagogies of learning
  • undertake research within a range of playful learning sites designed to spark curiosity and engagement by encouraging hands-on exploration and learning through play

The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child acknowledges the First Australian owners of the lands on where we gather and pay our respects to the Elders, lores, customs and creation spirits of this country.

The Centre recognises that the examples we set in diversity and inclusion will support young children to respect and celebrate differences in all people. We embed diversity, inclusivity and equality into all aspects of the Centre’s activities and welcome all people regardless of race, ethnicity, social background, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation and national origin.