Drawing by Sarah Strickler

How do children and parents learn about AI together?

Family as a Third Space for AI Literacies

While an entire generation of children is growing up with AI, family members are still wondering how might they best support their youngsters to critically understand and interact with smart devices. Parents are still questioning if and how they should use these new technologies in their homes. Families are trying to reconcile their fear of having their children left behind if not exposed to new smart technologies with their concern for personal data privacy.

Families participating in our study jointly engaged in AI literacy learning activities.

The more tech-savvy parents recognize the limitation of existing voice assistants for youth (i.e., 84.6% of Alexa kid skills do not provide privacy policies) and even wrote petitions to the appropriate regulators urging an investigation into Amazon’s violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Meanwhile, there are over 110 million virtual assistant users in the United States alone and more and more families are welcoming voice assistants into their homes.

In our previous studies, we found that children become more skeptical of AI smarts when they learn how to program and train their own smart games, moreover, we found…