The Kids’ DIY Media Partnership recognizes that do-it-yourself (DIY) digital media creation is an avenue for children to not only produce and share their ideas with the world, but also to develop many of the skills they’ll need to be participants, innovators, and leaders in the digital economy. The overall goal of the project is to build a better understanding of the technologies, users and stakeholder interests involved in the children’s online DIY media phenomenon, and to produce a set of best practices and policy recommendations for industry and government stakeholders.

Within the study’s six-year plan, I took part in the design and execution of a focus group study styled as a game-making session or ‘game-jam’ with children media-makers.

Research Questions

In order to take a deep-dive into the complex thoughts, behaviours, and influences behind children’s creative media-making, our study was structured as a focus group. Below are some of the research questions which guided the study:

Process: Study Format

Within each focus group, the participants were asked to create a level in their favourite game according to a pre-screening interview: Minecraft. We had three hours of interview, observation, and group discussion with our participants, with our time organized in the format below:

Process: Approach

This notion was a key influence in the design of our study, leading us to ask participants to explore complex personal phenomena, relationships, feelings, etc., through their own creativity by producing a thing or object (in this case, a game level on a digital platform). This would supplement textual or verbal data that is sometimes inadequate when dealing with complicated personal experiences.

In this study we treated the children as experts on the subject of their DIY media engagement. A semi-structured interview format allowed us to balance letting the children lead, with being able to guide them back to our pre-determined topics when necessary. To this end, the researchers configured ourselves as ‘Empathetic, Knowledgable Outsiders’:

Some other best practices we followed included…

Preliminary Findings

We were able to glean some fascinating insights from our sample group, however, staffing constraints have put a hold on the data analysis on our transcripts, and audio-visual data. We were nonetheless able to draw some preliminary findings from our consolidated notes for presentation to stakeholders and at a conference for the Canadian Game Studies Association.