Exploring Parent and Child Perceptions of an Educational Television Show with a Culturally Inclusive Focus to Computational Thinking

Lemley, Breniel

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ga5g-6026

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Exploring Parent and Child Perceptions of an Educational Television Show with a Culturally Inclusive Focus to Computational Thinking

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The rise in children’s media use (Rideout & Robb, 2020) and the prioritization of STEM learning (Fayer et al., 2017) has led to the development of new STEM-related apps, TV shows, and other media for young children. One topic in this area gaining popularity is computational thinking (CT). Researchers refer to CT as an approach to problem solving based in computer science (Barr et al., 2011) that involves concepts such as sequencing and debugging (Grover & Pea, 2013). Research suggests that learning CT at a young age can be beneficial to children’s analytical skills and provides them with new approaches to problem solving (Bers, 2018, 2020; Botički et al., 2018). The television program of focus to this dissertation is Work it Out Wombats!. This television program was created with an intentional focus on culturally relevant and inclusive approaches in an effort to support preschool viewers’ computational thinking skills. Research has shown that educational media has the potential to support young children’s STEM learning, however, there is little research on how to best meet the challenge of creating educational STEM media that effectively engages children of all races and ethnicities and positively impacts their learning. Work It Out Wombats! is the first attempt to try and accomplish this. This dissertation explores parents’ and children’s perception, understanding, and recognition of the culture and inclusion cues and the computational thinking cues embedded in the program. In this qualitative research study, 30 parent-child dyads were interviewed about their perceptions, understanding, and recognition of the culture and inclusion cues and the computational thinking cues embedded in the program. Interviews were conducted in person and completed in a University research space or community center in western and central Michigan. A semi-structured interview protocol was utilized to guide the discussion. The participants in our study shared rich and valuable insights about the Wombats! episodes they watched. Parents reported that they would encourage their child to watch the show, especially after learning about its focus on culture and inclusion and computational thinking. Parents identified and discussed the culture and inclusion themes unprompted when asked about their opinions about the show and its characters. Parents reacted positively to the characters and their portrayals, specifically the non-stereotypical portrayals and the non-traditional family structures. Although parents appreciated the culture and inclusion focus, some parents would have preferred for the cues to be more specific, particularly with the animal characters showing diversity and the language cues. Children, however, did not seem to noticed the culture and inclusion cues in these episodes. Regarding computational thinking, a majority of parents had never heard of it and when asked to try and define it, many parents did have aspects of computational thinking in their definitions however, their examples show that they did not have a full and complete understanding of the computational thinking curriculum. Parents believed that computational thinking is an important topic for their children to learn, however, some parents have reservations regarding the abstractness and age-appropriateness of the topic. Work It Out Wombats! is a first attempt at trying to create early STEM media that engages children of diverse race/ethnicities. Our results show that this show is an initial step in that direction, where early STEM media has diverse portrayals. More research should be done to measure the educational impact of this show, not only with computational thinking but also the culture and inclusion cues.

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