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.

As the role of interactive digital media continues to grow in our ever-connected lives, so too do the expectations of the caregivers and parents of today’s young people, particularly in scaffolding and brokering their experiences with online interactive media. Consequently, there are more and more ways for young people to socialize, learn, and create online. While these new forms of connection and access to information lead to many positive outcomes, some bring more challenging and complicated implications. In particular, young people are increasingly able to earn money and make a profit online from the fruits of their computational learning. This study seeks to better understand the complex landscape of young people’s experiences engaging with paid online work through detailed qualitative studies. I seek to explore the tensions around youth creation online and caregiver’s abilities to scaffold these experiences, with a particular emphasis on how caregivers conceptualize their children creating and become developers in online spaces.

This paper provides a framework that adapts a design tool known as personas to better capture the ways that caregivers mediate their children's use of interactive media. Interactive digital media has become a more pervasive part of families' lives and tensions have increased around children's engagement with digital media. Historically, caregivers have enacted various tactics to mediate their children's practices around digital media. However, the design of technologies for children fails to account for different approaches to caregiving and the relationships between caregivers and children, instead focusing on the caregiver and the child as separate entities. The goal of our framework is to enable designers to consider the caregiver-child relationship by adapting the persona design tool to account for the relationship between caregivers and children. Drawing from prior research from user experience on persona development and communication on parental mediation theory, the framework outlines five phases to be used as a guide to develop caregiver-child dyadic personas. A dyadic approach to persona design explicitly highlights the relationship between two individuals (in this case, caregiver and child). We suggest that designing with dyadic personas enables designers to be more aware of nuances in caregiver-child relationships and can surface opportunities to facilitate collaboration between caregivers and children around interactive media.