Parents play essential roles in children’s engagement with media, especially learning technologies like computational toys and kits. Situated in the context of parent-child co-use of computational learning technologies, we have done multiple explorations to understand what family Joint Media Engagement (JME) looks like and how we can facilitate productive joint media experiences through activity and technology designs. Exemplary explorations include investigating how parents perceive their children’s use of coding kits and their roles in such processes, how parents mediate their children’s interaction with the kits, and how different family members negotiate with each other when co-making with creative computing technologies. These explorations provide deep empirical insights into parent-child interaction patterns with educational media and shed light on the implications for designing learning experiences and technologies to support productive family joint media engagement. Continuing this research thread we are working on new projects to understand parent-child JME in the Hong Kong context from a cross-cultural perspective and aim to expand the theoretical framing of joint media engagement.

Parent-Child Joint Media Engagement within HCI: A Scoping Analysis of the Research Landscape [PDF | LINK]
Junnan Yu, Xiang Qi & Siqi Yang
In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), Honolulu, HI, USA.

Family Negotiation in Joint Media Engagement with Creative Computing [LINK]
Junnan Yu, Sari Widman & Ricarose Roque
In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), Hamburg, Germany.

Parental Facilitation of Young Children’s Technology-based Learning Experiences from Nondominant Groups During the COVID-19 Pandemic [LINK]
Junnan Yu, Julisa Granados, Ronni Hayden & Ricarose Roque
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 307 (October 2021), 27 pages. (CSCW ’21)

Parental Mediation for Young Children’s Use of Educational Media: A Case Study with Computational Toys and Kits [LINK]
Junnan Yu, Andrea DeVore & Ricarose Roque
In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), Yokohama, Japan.

Considering Parents in Coding Kit Design: Understanding Parents’ Perspectives and Roles [LINK]
Junnan Yu, Chenke Bai & Ricarose Roque
In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20), Honolulu, HI, USA.