What types of educational resources would help elementary school-age children learn about privacy online? Below I share findings and recommendations from a paper I co-wrote with Jessica Vitak, Marshini Chetty, Tammy Clegg, Jonathan Yang, Brenna McNally, and Elizabeth Bonsignore. I’ll present this paper at the 2018 ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC).
What did we do? Children spend hours going online at home and school, but they receive little to no education about how going online affects their privacy. We explored the power of games and storytelling as two mechanisms for teaching children about privacy online.
How did we do it? We held three co-design sessions with Kidsteam, a team of children ages 7-11 and adults who meet regularly at the University of Maryland to design new technologies. In session 1, we reviewed existing privacy resources with children and elicited design ideas for new resources. In session 2, we iterated on a conceptual prototype of a mobile app inspired by the popular game Doodle Jump. Our version, which we called Privacy Doodle Jump, incorporated quiz questions related to privacy and security online. In session 3, children developed their own interactive Choose Your Own Adventure stories related to privacy online.
What did we find? We found that materials designed to teach children about privacy online often instruct children on “do’s and don’ts” rather than helping them develop the skills to navigate privacy online. Such straightforward guidelines can be useful when introducing children to complex subjects like privacy, or when working with younger children. However, focusing on lists of rules does little to equip children with the skills they need to make complex, privacy-related decisions online. If a resource presents children with scenarios that resonate with their everyday life, children may be more likely to understand and absorb its message. For example, a child might more easily absorb a privacy lesson from a story about another child who uses Instagram than a game that uses a fictional character in an imaginary world.
What are the implications of this work?
- First, educational resources related to privacy should use scenarios that relate to children’s everyday lives. For instance, our Privacy Doodle Jump game included a question that asked a child what they would do if they were playing Xbox and saw an advertisement pop up that asked them to buy something.
- Second, educational resources should go beyond listing do’s and don’ts for online behavior and help children develop strategies for dealing with new and unexpected scenarios they may encounter. Because context is such an important part of privacy-related decision making, resources should facilitate discussion between parents or teachers and children rather than simply tell children how to behave.
- Third, educational resources should showcase a variety of outcomes of different online behaviors instead of framing privacy as a black and white issue. For instance, privacy guidelines may instruct children to never turn on location services, but this decision might differ based on the app that is requesting the data. Turning on location services in Snapchat may pinpoint one’s house to others — a potential negative, — but turning on location services in Google Maps may yield real-time navigation — a potential positive. Exposing children to a variety of positive and negative consequences of privacy-related decision making can help them develop the skills they need to navigate uncharted situations online.
Read the IDC 2018 paper for more details!
Citation: Priya Kumar, Jessica Vitak, Marshini Chetty, Tamara L. Clegg, Jonathan Yang, Brenna McNally, and Elizabeth Bonsignore. 2018. Co-Designing Online Privacy-Related Games and Stories with Children. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 67-79. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3202185.3202735
Parts of this entry were cross-posted on the Princeton HCI blog.
Priya Kumar 
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