“Just like I said, I’m not bad at doing this kind of technology stuff” : children’s technology attitudes and co-designed anti-bullying technologies

Abstract

School bullying is an issue that most children face in their lives by being bullied, witnessing the situations as bystanders, or being the bullies themselves. Bullying is an issue that can have serious, long-term effects, and therefore, it must be solved. Including children in participatory design allows them to understand what technology is and empowers them to use it to solve issues they face, such as bullying. Participatory design includes children in design processes as experts of their own lives to create solutions for themselves and their peers.

It is important to know children´s attitudes towards technology when participating them in co-design. In this study, 23 6th graders were included. The attitudes they reflected towards technology and technology design were determined with a semi-structured interview and analyzed with emergent coding to create summaries of the attitudes. Children´s technology solutions created in small groups were analyzed through the children´s drawings, writings, and group interviews. The analysis results were then compared to solutions created by adults to notice potential similarities and differences.

Children generally reflect positive attitudes towards technology, for example, their skills in using it. Still, most children do not want to use technology and do not want to design technology themselves. Children´s technological solutions include similar means of tackling bullying compared to solutions developed by adults, but still, there are significant differences, for example, in terms of actual technology. Further research could help determine the reasoning why children do not want to be involved with technology although our society requires them to, how power structures and authority over space could be resolved in design processes with children, how child-lead design processes could be implemented and how children´s anti-bullying solutions could be brought to use.