This paper investigates museum educators' perceptions of play, games, and learning, as well as their approaches to designing and implementing interactive experiences. Through a thematic analysis, we found that museum educators tend to favor games and hands-on learning due to the strong association between learning, play, and curiosity. This connection often drives educators to integrate games and interactive elements into museum experiences. Key challenges in the design process included limited resources, time, and skills, as well as more contextual tensions. These included balancing 'fun' versus serious learning objectives and addressing discomfort that may arise from certain learning experiences, with the recognition that not all games need to be designed solely for fun. Our paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how educators incorporate game-like and playful learning in museums. We also offer a design considerations in the form of a checklist to guide other museum educators in developing effective play-based learning experiences.

In this paper, we conduct a content analysis to investigate the implications of the "Age-Appropriate Design Code" for the design of interactive digital media children are likely to use. The "Age-Appropriate Design Code" policy framework, implemented in the United Kingdom in 2021 with a modified version later signed into law in California in 2022, shifts the focus beyond just the protection of children's data to a broader focus on how the interaction with digital technologies might affect or even harm children. Our content analysis of both the UK and California codes identifies a number of design considerations framed around four main categories namely design values, communication of information, interactions with technology, and data management. While recognizing the robustness of the Age-Appropriate Design Codes, we also identify certain uncertainties and challenges in implementing guidelines in the context of interactive digital media. Our findings contribute to the ongoing conversation about designing safe and age-appropriate online spaces for children.

In this paper we searched the websites of 60 popular online multiplayer games to locate their codes of conduct and then performed a content analysis on 32 unique codes of conduct. Our analysis consisted of a two-cycle coding process including initial coding, and then pattern coding for clustering categories and themes together. Our aim was to better understand how game companies include codes of conduct on their websites and what content they include in the codes of conduct. The two-cycle coding process identified five main themes: (1) game company values, (2) expectations of players, (3) bad behaviors and rules, (4) moderation practices, and finally (5) document structure. Our findings suggest that codes of conduct are routinely inaccessible, if present at all, and that codes of conduct are often framed around punitive legal language that reflect policies of misconduct rather than expressing communal values and expectations. Our findings can help contribute towards community management in online games and make codes of conduct more accessible for all stakeholders in online gaming communities. We have also provided design recommendations and a design process that should help guide game companies looking to create value focused codes of conduct.

Rules, a quintessential property of any and every game, are one of the factors that influence player experiences. Online multiplayer games have two dimensions of rules that can be leveraged to improve player experiences - game rules that developers work with at the game design level and server rules that the player community creates and maintains. A few studies suggest that server rules can be leveraged to shape player experiences at the individual and community levels, but little work has investigated the role of server rules in play communities tailored for youth. The rise in online multiplayer gaming among youth motivates a need to understand how server rules shape the culture and climate of online communities. Using a mixed methods research approach, we analyzed server rules (1920) across 60 "in-the-wild" moderated Minecraft servers. We report on findings from a subset of 19 Minecraft servers explicitly tailored for young adolescents (475 rules). We offer a nuanced understanding of server rules in relation to youth developmental needs, particularly during early adolescence (ages 7-14 years) and discuss how server rules can be harnessed to shape positive player experiences in online gaming communities for all youth.

Today, preschool-aged children have an abundance of digital content to choose from, with some more desirable than others from a developmental perspective. We aim to describe and better understand the interplay of factors that influence children’s selection of media content using a year-long, multi-case ethnography of 13 diverse families in Southern California. We found that young children’s media content selection may be best understood as an ecologically situated process involving the interplay between the content, the child, their family, community, and societal spheres. Children do not make media selections on their own. Rather, these choices are supported or constrained by a range of resource, culture, and policy factors specific to family and community background. We argue that policy makers and technology designers are better served by an ecological perspective if they wish to understand how digital content is selected and used by children in sociocultural context.

Online settings have been suggested as viable sites for youth to develop social, emotional, and technical skills that can positively shape their behavior online. However, little work has been done to understand how online governance structures might support (or hinder) such learning. Using mixed-methods research, we report findings from a 2-year, in-the-wild study of 8–13 year olds on a custom multiplayer Minecraft server. The two-part study focuses on the design of youth-centered models of community governance drawn from evidence-based offline practices in the prevention and learning sciences. Preliminary results point to a set of socio-technical design approaches shaping player behavior while also supporting youth interest in Minecraft-like online environments. More broadly, the findings suggest an alternative vision of youth’s capacity for ownership and control of mechanisms shaping the culture and climate of their online communities: managing player behavior while challenging current norms around adult control and surveillance of youth activity.

The world is becoming increasingly multilingual. In the U.S., despite rapid growth in linguistic diversity, there is a complete lack of multilingual language assessment tools and a severe shortage of multilingual clinicians to detect language impairments among children who speak minority languages. To develop accessible child language assessment tools, we designed MECO-LAB, a web-based bilingual Mandarin-English assessment that uses parents as one of the potential groups of test administrators. We analyzed 16 videos of child-parent dyads and found that with minimal instructions, the majority (11 out of 16) of parents were capable of administering MECO-LAB to their children. We identified 296 interference and 381 support behaviors from parents that are influenced by linguistic, cognitive, emotional, and technical factors that researchers should consider when designing online language assessments. We proposed design recommendations for supporting child-parent interactions in similar applications that enable parents to administer online bilingual language assessments to their children.

Online multiplayer games like Minecraft, gaining increasing popularity among present-day youth, include rich contexts for social interactions but are also rife with interpersonal conflict among players. Research shows that a variety of socio-technical mechanisms (e.g., server rules, chat filters, use of in-game controls to ban players, etc.) aim to limit and/or eliminate social conflict in games like Minecraft. However, avoiding social conflict need not necessarily always be a useful approach. Broadly defined in CSCW literature as a phenomenon that may arise even amidst mutual cooperation, social conflict can yield positive outcomes depending on how it is managed (e.g., [Easterbrook et al.,1993]). In fact, the aforementioned approaches to avoid conflict may not be helpful as they do not help youth understand how to address similar interpersonal differences that may occur in other social settings. Furthermore, prior research has established the value of developing conflict-resolution skills during early adolescence within safe settings, such as school/after-school wellness and prevention interventions (e.g.,[Shure, 1982], [Aber et al., 1998]), for later success in any given interpersonal relationship. While games like Minecraft offer authentic contexts for encountering social conflict, little work thus far has explored how to help youth develop conflict-resolution skills by design interventions within online interest-driven settings. Drawing from prior literature in CSCW, youth wellness and prevention programs, we translated offline evidence-based strategies into the design of an online, after-school program that was run within a moderated Minecraft server. The online program, titled Survival Lab, was designed to promote problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills in youth (ages 8-14 years). We conducted a field study for six months (30 youth participants, four college-age moderators, and one high-school volunteer aged 15 years) using in-game observations and digital trace ethnographic approaches. Our study data reveals that participating youth created community norms and developed insightful solutions to conflicts in Survival Lab. Our research offers three key takeaways. Firstly, online social games like Minecraft lend themselves as feasible settings for the translation of offline evidence-based design strategies in promoting the development of conflict-resolution and other social competencies among youth. Secondly, the design features that support structured and unstructured play while enabling freedom of choice for youth to engage as teams and/or individuals are viable for collective or community-level outcomes. Third and finally, moderators, as caring adults and near-peer mentors, play a vital role in facilitating the development of conflict-resolution skills and interest-driven learning among youth. We discuss the implications of our research for translating offline design to online play-based settings as sites and conclude with recommendations for future work.

Multiplayer online games, such as Minecraft, have the potential to be powerful sites for youth learning, but can be plagued by inter-personal conflicts. This brings the need for online moderation. However, only very little is known about the practices through which such moderation happens, or how socio-technical systems could be designed to enable 'safe' learning spaces online. To start addressing this gap, our research examines the existing mediation practices within a moderated Minecraft server for children aged 8-13. As part of our 14 months long engagement, we triangulate data from participant observation, interviews, and analysis of server logs. We demonstrate how---in trying to 'keep peace'---the online moderators monopolised the conflict resolution process, essentially preventing the children from actively working with and learning from the experiences of conflict. In response to these findings, we present an alternative framework for online conflict mediation, suggesting ways in which existing conflict resolution techniques originating in Prevention Science could be re-interpreted for online multiplayer settings