A walk on the child side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility
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Presentation for CHI 2019. The article, authored by Chiara Leonardi, Paolo Massa, Gianluca Schiavo, Amy L. Murphy, Elisabetta Farella and I, was presented at CHI 2019 in the session "Access for Families Across Context". The article received an honourable mention and investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technology designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses.
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A walk on the child side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility
- 1. A walk on the child side Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility Michela Ferron, Chiara Leonardi, Paolo Massa, Gianluca Schiavo, Amy L. Murphy, Elisabetta Farella
- 2. Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility
- 3. Child independent mobility 3 Positive impact on children’s wellbeing and development
- 4. Video on pedibus smart goes here Message: what is a walking bus? Children gather at the walking bus stops and walk together to school under the supervision of adult volunteers SMART Pedibus 4 Children gather at the walking bus stops and walk together to school under the supervision of adult volunteers SMART Pedibus
- 6. How did children… …interact with the technology? …think it worked? Research questions (1) 7
- 7. What do parents think about… …tracking their children’s presence? …mobile devices and children autonomy? Research questions (2) 8
- 8. Method 7 participant observations in two primary schools with ~60 children aged 6 to 10: 3 observations in School 1 4 observations in School 2 (adoption process) 9
- 9. Method 11 semi-structured interviews with adults 1 workshop with 5 adults 2 workshops with 9 children 6-10 years old 10
- 10. A disappearing technology Visibility levels of technology 11
- 11. Visibility levels of technology 12
- 12. Valuing the social side of the experience Visibility levels of technology “The technology provides a faster registering of children. There’s more time to […] talk to the children, ask ‘where do you live’ and get to know each other” 13
- 13. The app on volunteers’ smartphones attracts children Visibility levels of technology 14 “…yes, he wants to start the app, […] he is very curious about it. But I don’t always let him, because in that moment he is privileged, to respect other children” 14
- 14. Visibility levels of technology Children had a good understanding of the system functioning and data acquisition “It is connected to the phone and can do a sort of roll call” “It collects our names and sends it to a secure place” 15
- 15. Achieving autonomy is a process that needs to be sustained: Children need to make mistakes and learn from them Balance between monitoring and trusting “Children need trust and self-esteem, they need to feel big and responsible, it’s important for them to have moral support and to know that we believe in them” 16
- 16. An Evolving Balance Balance between monitoring and trusting “The more they grow, the more we need to give autonomy, it becomes a matter of relationship, of education of spaces and trust, of autonomy.” 17
- 17. Risk reduction GPS Surveillance Childrens’ autonomy Independence Balance between monitoring and trusting “I’d like to gain the trust that allows me to give autonomy, not to give autonomy because I have tracking technology”
- 18. Risk reduction GPS Surveillance Childrens’ autonomy Independence Balance between monitoring and trusting Smart pedibus Proximity detection
- 19. Takeaways Technology in the background Parents valued trust and despised monitoring Achieving autonomy is a process Technology should rely on networks of trusted people 20
- 21. Resources Full article Blogpost on Medium Blogpost on micferron.com Research team smartcommunitylab.it/climb-en/ i3.fbk.eu e3da.fbk.eu 22 A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobi Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility. M. Ferron, C. Leonardi, P. Massa, G. Schiavo, A. L. Murphy, E. Farella
Editor's Notes
- Children independent mobility has been shown to have positive effects on physical, psychological wellbeing and cognitive development, improving problem solving skills. Today, society has gradually moved towards a risk-adverse attitude, and parents perceive the outdoor space as dangerous, limiting the opportunities for children’s independent mobility. Now, technology provides an easy and straighforward answer to parent’s anxiety with simple, affordable and easy location tracking. Research has addressed the use and the impact of GPS location tracking in families. In this work we tried instead to investigate more how technology could support children independent mobility while respecting parents’ need for peace of mind and children’s rights.
- We did so by leveraging on the practice of the local walking school bus (pedibus in Italian), which has been running for several years in the municipality of Trento, northern Italy.
- This work is part of a large living lab initiative that aims at fostering child independent, sustainable and active mobility. Here, we focus on the Smart Pedibus (Italian for walking bus), which is one of the project’s activities. TGR https://www.rainews.it/tgr/emiliaromagna/notiziari/video/2019/03/ContentItem-98f08c38-9534-4626-8aeb-a9a5804a00ef.html
- In particular we focused on a technology that was specifically designed to support the walking school bus: the smart pedibus. It combines two technologies: a Bluetooth low energy device, which is very energy efficient (in fact the battery can last all the school year), which is given to each child and, in the morning, when the child arrives at the walking bus stop, it talks to an application installed on the volunteer’s smartphone and simply register the child in the proximity of the volunteer to complete an attendance list.
- And we wanted to understand, first, children Interaction patterns with the technology: If, and how they interacted with it And how did they think it worked and managed their data?
- We also used the walking school bus practice , even if it cannot be defined by itself as an example of child independent mobility, as a prompt to investigate parents attitudes toward monitoring and autonomy: What do they think about tracking their children’s presence? …about mobile devices and children autonomy? We exploited this experiment to trigger children’s, volunteers’ and parents’ reflections on the use of technology to support children independent mobility: Interaction patterns: how did adults and children interact with the proximity detection device? How did they think it worked? What do they think about how their data are managed and used? Attitudes towards monitoring and autonomy of children: what are parents’ perspective about tracking their children’s presence? Which concerns do they have about mobile devices meant to support child autonomy?
- We did so by emplying different methodology to gradually converge into our research questions. First, we observed the walking school bus in the morning in 2 primary schools, with about 60 children aged 6 to 10 years old. In the first school, the smart pedibus was a very well known practice which had been running for several years. In the second school we observed the adoption process: we observed how it worked before the technology, we went there the first day the technology was in use, and then after one week and after one month.
- Then we conducted semi-structured interviews with parents to investigate the major themes that emergend from our observations. And then we did 3 workshops, 1 with parents and 2 with children, in which we asked to draw their daily experience with the walking school bus and to elaborate on their drawings. For the parents, we also used a scenario-based discussion to better investigate their attitudes towards monitoring and trusting childre. In the workshops we combined a drawing task to foster visual thinking Scenario based discussion for parents
- The first thing we observed is that the device disappeared into the backpack of the children. In the first school, where the smart pedibus had been running for several years, we never saw it. In the second school, we observed that the first day the technology was in use, children wore the device at the neck, with a lanyard. But just after one week it had already moved into the backpack. Children received the device with a lanyard, but it soon became invisible, disappearing into the backpack. In Vela (where the Smart pedibus was already well-practiced) the devices were already hidden In Cognola (where we followed the process of adoption) we witnessed the at first they were worn around the neck, but after only a few days, they migrated into the backpack. Parents encouraged this disappearance to avoid diverting chidlren’s attention from the walking bus practice (pleasure of walking together to school). For this reason they also liked the basic design of the device (no screens, buttons, leds). None of the children drew the device or the smartphone - only one parent drew the smartphone This reinforces the disappearance of the device
- This was confirmed by the drawings of children and parents: these for example are 4 drawings of children, and do you see what’s missing here? There a re contextual and social elements, children, volunteers, a tree, the home a fountain, the bus stop, the bus, a supermarket, but there is no technology. Children received the device with a lanyard, but it soon became invisible, disappearing into the backpack. In Vela (where the Smart pedibus was already well-practiced) the devices were already hidden In Cognola (where we followed the process of adoption) we witnessed the at first they were worn around the neck, but after only a few days, they migrated into the backpack. Parents encouraged this disappearance to avoid diverting chidlren’s attention from the walking bus practice (pleasure of walking together to school). For this reason they also liked the basic design of the device (no screens, buttons, leds). None of the children drew the device or the smartphone - only one parent drew the smartphone This reinforces the disappearance of the device
- And we observed that this disappearance was encouraged by the parents, because they didn’t want the technology to distract the children from the social and educational values of walking to school together. For this reason, parents appreciated the simple design of the device, which has no buttons, screens, leds or interactive elements. In addition, the smart pedibus allowed a faster registering of the children compared to the pen&paper system used before, and this allowed the volunteers to have more time to pend with children and get to know each other. Citations: P6 (this aspect was mentioned by 7 out of 11)
- On the other hand, the application on the smartphone volunteers attracted children: we observed collaboration dynamic during the initial registering phase in the morning. This was less appreciated by parents for the reason I said before, that is it distracted children from being with others. One parent said: Citations: P8
- Children also had a very good understanding of the functioning of the technology: they knew it wasn’t tracking their location but simply collecting their names into the application and then sending them to our servers in our institution. Interviews with parents showed only a partial understanding on how the technology worked, but this was not perceived as an issue by adults in Vela, where the Smart Pedibus is well-established Children instead showed a good understanding: “the device brings up the name of the children to the volunteer’s smartphone”, “it shows who is and who isn’t on the walking bus”, “it collects our names and sends them to a secure place” Citations: C2 and C4
- We used this practice as a prompt to investigate on parents attitudes toward monitoring and trusting. Parents perceived a clear tension between the need to protect their children and the responsibility of fostering their autonomy. They recognized that achieving full autonomy is a process in which trust plays a central role, and that children should be allowed to gradually experiment with autonomy, but in a safe environment. This is only possible in a safe environment, which should be not provided entirely by the technology (because technology can fail), but by informal networks of trusted people, supported by technology Citations: P3 (this aspect was mentioned by 8 out of 11)
- They also akcnowledged that in this process, parents, children and their relationship have changing needs. Parents reflected about the evolving boundaries of privacy and autonomy: as they grow, children need more autonomy and privacy, and parents need to gradually release the monitoring pressure, despite the fear that this increased autonomy brings for parents. Citations: P11 (this aspect was mentioned by all the parents in the workshop)
- Parents perceived a clear tension between their desire for peace of mind, their need to provide their children with a safe environment, and they were tempted by using GPS tracking, or by giving their children a smartphone and have the peace of mind of knowing they could reach them anywhere and whenever they liked. But on the other hand, they felt that GPS tracking could endanger trusting relationships with their family, and that it was their responsibility to show trust and help their children to reach autonomy. Citation: P10 (this aspect was mentioned by all the parents in the workshop)
- In this context, we propose proximity based technology as a fair technological compromise that can mediate between these two extremes, respecting parents’ need for peace of mind and children’s rights.
- To summarize, we studied these aspects in the context of the walking bus, which is not an independent mobility practice per se, but gave us the opportunity to investigate a number of aspects related to children independent mobility. First, we observed that the technology disappeared into the background because the important values were social and educational. We found that the parents we interviewed experienced a tension between wanting to monitor their children and trusting them, but still they valued trust and despised monitoring. They recognized that achieving autonomy is a process that needs to be sustained and to take place in a safe environment. But that we cannot rely only on technology for this, but rather using technology to empower informal networks of trusted people. social, educational values are at the center proximity technology provides a safe but hidden network for children to experiment with autonomy Reflection on the role of technology to foster children’s autonomy and independent mobility: technology should rely on trusted social networks, helping to build a safe environment in which children can experiment with the world, and gradually release the monitoring pressure as the children grow older and negotiate the boundaries within the family.
- To summarize, we studied these aspects in the context of the walking bus, which is not an independent mobility practice per se, but gave us the opportunity to investigate a number of aspects related to children independent mobility. First, we observed that the technology disappeared into the background because the important values were social and educational. We found that the parents we interviewed experienced a tension between wanting to monitor their children and trusting them, but still they valued trust and despised monitoring. They recognized that achieving autonomy is a process that needs to be sustained and to take place in a safe environment. But that we cannot rely only on technology for this, but rather using technology to empower informal networks of trusted people. social, educational values are at the center proximity technology provides a safe but hidden network for children to experiment with autonomy Reflection on the role of technology to foster children’s autonomy and independent mobility: technology should rely on trusted social networks, helping to build a safe environment in which children can experiment with the world, and gradually release the monitoring pressure as the children grow older and negotiate the boundaries within the family.