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