Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

By LiAnna Davis

In the computer game Snack Time, players control a yellow, circular character with a mouth that opens on the side. Guiding the character through a maze on the screen, players score points when it eats certain objects and lose points when it runs into certain obstacles. Sound familiar?

Fans of the classic 1980s arcade game Pac-Man will instantly recognize the basic setup. Yet in this new version, players score points for nabbing orange juice, carrots, apples, and bananas (rather than dots or “energizers”), while the attacking ghosts have been replaced by potato chips, bottles of soda pop, chocolate bars, and cookies.

Snack Time is an “advergame,” an application that combines play with a promotional message. In this case, the advertisement is for healthy eating; players are rewarded for choosing healthy snacks and docked points for selecting junk food. The advergame could be a piece in the puzzle of how to reverse the growing childhood obesity trend in the United States.

“The game builds upon implicit learning,” explains Dr. Sandra Calvert, chair of the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University. Implicit learning (examined in a past issue of Research News) is the process by which people gain knowledge through interaction with their surroundings without conscious awareness. Dr. Calvert and her team bring the game into third and fourth grade classrooms at D.C. public schools, let each student play the game twice, then have them choose a snack of either a banana or a bag of potato chips and a drink of orange juice or soda.

“The majority of kids choose the healthy snacks after just playing the game,” she says. “All of them know how to choose healthy foods, but not all of them do it.”

Looking at food advertising on multimedia platforms is one aspect of the Children’s Digital Media Center, a consortium of researchers based at Georgetown of which Dr. Calvert is the director. The CDMC is currently working on its second five-year grant from the National Science Foundation and also has financial support from the Stuart Family Foundation and from the Reflective Engagement in the Public Interest initiative at Georgetown University. The first NSF grant examined the role that identity and interactivity play in childhood learning during the digital age. The second NSF grant examines the influences of media during early development, with a particular focus on how children learn to “read” a screen.

“What kind of learning is taking place in the 21st century? What impact does it have on kids?” asks Dr. Calvert, whose center studies children from infancy through the college years. Children ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6.5 hours each day interacting with media. Her work accepts that technology is part of the lives of young people in our society and examines ways that time spent with interactive media can be constructive and educational.

For example, another aspect of the obesity initiative is a content analysis of Internet advertising for food products on websites aimed at children. She hopes to find ways to combat childhood obesity by employing digital media like the Snack Time advergame or video diaries of children’s food intake. One idea came after Dr. Calvert’s research team noticed bloggers tracking weight loss due to playing their Nintendo Wii sporting games (see related video).

How children interact with the screen is a key facet of all of the CDMC projects. When people watch television, play a video game, work on the computer, or play with a toy, they often experience what social scientists call a parasocial interaction—a relationship with a media character. While we may feel like we know the character well, that character has no idea about who we are. Celebrities are an example of a parasocial relationship with a real person; in the digital realm, many of the parasocial interactions that children experience are with characters like Mister Rogers, Elmo, or Dora the Explorer. Children are learning through these interactions, and exactly what they are learning is one focus of the CDMC. The team plans to conduct an Elmo study to document the earliest parasocial interactions of young children.

Another CDMC project involves the Nick Jr. Baby Curious Buddies series, a set of characters in educational videos for babies and toddlers. Dr. Calvert’s research team brings in children aged 2 to 3 and has them play a computer game in which the Curious Buddies characters hide and are then discovered when the child hits a computer key. Once the child has played the game several times, researchers bring the toddler into a room that is designed to mimic the set on the screen exactly—with the Curious Buddies characters all hiding in the same places that they hid when in the computer game—and ask the child to find a specific character. This study measures information transfer, or children’s ability to relocate knowledge gained in the computer game into the real world. This project is similar to the work on early learning and television being done by Dr. Calvert’s Georgetown colleague Dr. Rachel Barr, who is a collaborator on various CDMC projects.

Dr. Calvert is a consultant for Nick Jr. and Sesame Workshop and serves on advisory boards for PBS Kids Next Generation and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center for Educational Media and Research. She views her consulting as a way to use her knowledge from years of research to impact what media choices children have. Dr. Calvert has worked on policy issues as well, including hosting a symposium in 2003 to discuss the need for a comprehensive media research agenda with guest speakers Senators Sam Brownback and Joe Lieberman. She then helped the Senators write the Children and Media Research Advancement Act (CAMRA), legislation that is still pending.

Despite all of her commitments, Dr. Calvert keeps up with the latest digital media, what she terms a “moving target.” She recalls her beginnings in the field, when television programs were the only media choice available to children. She now sandwiches work on the social psychology aspects of Facebook networking and the health benefits of playing Wii tennis video games, all in the name of science.

“It’s what I do,” she says simply. “I have a passion for this line of work. My favorite part is discovering new things about children and how they think, uncovering how we can use digital media in a way that is entertaining and educational. We have to marshal the power of digital media if we want to maximize what our children’s worlds will be like in the 21st century, for they increasingly live and develop in a digital space.”

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