Reflections on project lifecycle in learning design: Digital Wellness for Young Children

As two professionals in adjacent industries (Sesame Workshop and Boston Children’s Hospital Digital Wellness Lab) we saw an opportunity to bring a unique event to HGSE for fellow students across Harvard University. Focusing on the areas of early childhood informal learning and digital wellness for youth, the event we conceptualized aimed to strike a balance between audience engagement and education to offer expert insights around the following problem statement:

The health implications of sustained interactive media use on youth mental health are well known (HHS, 2023). Much attention has been paid to how interactive media use (IMU) impacts the mental health and well-being of older youth and young adults, positively or negatively.
Currently, less attention is paid to the effects of IMU in early childhood (EC), particularly potential impacts on important developmental competencies like executive functioning (Common Sense Media, 2020). As such, no comprehensive, accessible, and in-real-time practical recommendations and resources exist for caregivers and young children (0-8 years old) on promoting digital well-being that incorporates expert-designed strategies and tools to promote healthy use and engagement with interactive media beginning in Early Childhood.

We decided to design the following learning experience and deliverable proposal to address the problem statement, with a target date of Mid-Feb to mid-March, 2024.

Plan + Deliverables:

Academic Event: Host an in-person convening at Harvard University with experts across the youth IMU and EC fields
1. Deliverables:
  1. Synthesize current research on EC IMU and propose recommendations to be disseminated across formal learning environments, informal/home learning environments, and health care.
  2. Convening recommendations for caregiver and child resources will be published in a publically accessible white paper and disseminated across the DWL, Harvard, and SW platforms.
Commercial Offering: Sesame Workshop will sponsor a hackathon, challenging education-focused engineering teams to develop a device or tool designed for children and families to promote digital well-being and digital literacy, and to prevent and/or intervene in the issues that will arise in this new era of IMU+AI.

After extensive conversations with potential speakers, stakeholders, and internal and external partners, we decided to hone the problem statement to focus more directly on our shared interest – exploring the potential impacts of conversational AI when introduced in early childhood.

While planning for the fully executed event was underway, we suddenly found that we faced a challenge. Sesame received a major grant focused on digital well-being and the new timeline conflicted with the proposal and context we had been working on. Below is more information on our project post-mortem analysis, and what we’re beginning to look to next for our partnership: