Zebra Cakes: A children's language acquisition game
Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies Carly Kocurek and Assistant Professor of Psychology Jennifer Miller demoed their Nayar Prize I project, a children's video game called Zebra Cakes, at the 2016 Special Topics Meeting: Technology and Media in Children's Development, held from Oct. 27-30, 2016 at the University of California, Irvine.
The Zebra Cakes game is an experimental tool to assess whether learning games can help aid language acquisition in two- to three-year-old children.
"We had a lot of great conversations about usability and user testing with young players, and we're currently processing data from the past year," Kocurek said. "The game is a fully featured demo, but we're really looking at what we can learn from feedback on the game and at data we collected over the past year to optimize in the future."
To design the game, the research team carried out multiple studies, looking at children's interests, preferences, and their ability to use touch-screen devices; parents' attitudes towards children's use of devices; and the views of early childhood educators with regard to educational games and technology. But the research is made more complicated as views on children’s relationships with technology continue to shift.
"This is a really new area in a lot of ways since the American Association of Pediatrics just relaxed their recommendations on children's screen use," Kocurek said. "They now say up to two hours a day is okay for children two and older; this is a lot more reflective of people's daily lives, but we collectively just don't know enough about how screens affect children or what children can learn from on-screen interactions. There's a tremendous amount of potential, and a lot more work is needed."
The research team is planning further revisions and improvements to optimize the game. To reach the point of being ready for public release, Zebra Cakes will need to undergo at least two additional iterations. Zebra Cakes is also envisioned as one module of a larger game, which would feature multiple stories with different characters focusing on different clusters of words.
