Authors:
Gökçe Elif Baykal
The key to many human skills—learning new information, engaging in an activity, persistence at work, building and maintaining long-term habits—is intrinsic motivation. As active learners, children are intrinsically motivated to explore phenomena in their environment [1]. Today, however, the environments of many children are filled with technological tools. As such, they actively explore resources, search for new information, carry out tasks, gain new skills, and build long-term habits by interacting with technology. Moreover, some of these tools are not necessarily designed for children. It is therefore essential, yet challenging, for interaction designers to find ways to understand and support the underlying factors that affect children's intrinsic motivation, and to incorporate research-driven, age-appropriate solutions into technology design.
Why Does Technology Matter for Children's Intrinsic Motivation?
According to the pioneering work of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci [2], intrinsic motivation, especially in humans, is not relevant to reward systems or extrinsic validations. Rather, it is a key natural way to build skills, supporting curiosity-driven learning for long-term satisfaction. Like adults, children also experience intrinsic motivation when engaging in everyday tasks and learning activities. Technology, however, is rapidly changing the nature of these tasks and learning activities [3]. Thus, understanding the wider impact of technology on children's motivation is gaining attention in child-computer interaction (CCI), a subfield of human-computer interaction that concerns the study of the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computer systems and products for children [4]. Gamification and game-based learning environments are also receiving increased attention, as they both offer potential for shaping human behavior, increasing participation, and motivating children to engage.
Insights
→ Unlike extrinsic motivators such as rewards or badges, intrinsic motivation stems from a child's curiosity and enjoyment in exploring and mastering new skills.
→ Six key sub-constructs of intrinsic motivation are interest and enjoyment, effort and importance, perceived competence, pressure and tension, perceived choice, and value and usefulness.
→ Effective interaction design for children should balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors.
When we look at people's interactions with technology, we need to draw a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation [2]. Interacting with technology inevitably demands at least some external motivation factors. In addition to the novelty effect in experiencing a cutting-edge technology, the contentment in having access to the latest emerging tools, or a sense of fulfillment from keeping technology-related skills or knowledge updated, there are also some design elements that extrinsically motivate people. These motivational design elements often involve gamification or game-based educational tools. Within these systems, one of the most common design elements for cultivating motivation is reward systems, which provide feedback indicating that one's input, efforts, or endeavors are acknowledged and valued. Rewards often appear in the form of quantified expressions of approval, such as scores, likes, and badges that are earned by completing a task, reaching a set goal, or simply engaging with an application. Most of these rewards are linked to extrinsic factors of motivation. And as rewards play a role in shaping behavior, the determinants for earning rewards also shape what children value or prioritize in their interactions with and/or through technology, such as engaging with content for the sake of increasing the number of points or likes.
Engaging children in activities that align with their interests and values is a foundational step in cultivating intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are intermingled in CCI. It is therefore important to examine the underlying factors that may lead to meaningful design choices toward balancing external and internal motives in technology design for children. Highlighting underlying intrinsic motivation factors and incorporating them into a set of interaction design goals can be a useful starting point. These factors represent areas of convergence from the amalgamated dimensions of intrinsic motivation. Below, I will elaborate on the underlying factors of intrinsic motivation identified by Ryan and Deci [2] by providing some insights from parents based on their everyday experiences, which my students and I recently gathered through in-depth interviews to inform interaction designers on this topic [5].
Underlying Factors of Intrinsic Motivation and Relevance to CCI
Interest and enjoyment. These imply innate curiosity and wonder about the world or a phenomenon that makes a child explore, investigate, engage, and feel passionate during a learning experience. Children's engagement relies on their ability to stay on task and undistracted. Intrinsic motivation for engagement can therefore be achieved through creating a sense of relatability, where it is easy for children to understand and build connections with existing knowledge and interests, as well as creating a sense of curiosity, so children enjoy learning new information and skills to build on existing ones.
Applying interest and enjoyment to design. Many educational technologies are designed to be interactive and engaging. Interactive learning experiences, such as educational apps, games, and simulations, can capture children's interest and maintain their attention, fostering a sense of curiosity. The key is to create a balance between information and exploration that allows children to determine their long-term goals and fields of interest while leaving room for imagination. For instance, facilitating vocabulary learning in toddlers during reading experiences is important for their language development. Being aware of their age-appropriate vocabulary and introducing some new words within a text complemented with pictures allows them to discover the meaning of new words on their own. The novelty of the information as well as the joy of feeling capable of discovering something new themselves could trigger children's intrinsic motivation in engaging with content.
Effort and importance. These factors go beyond simple engagement and are associated with commitment and self-determination that help one stay on task. This type of motive is also related to focused engagement that involves rule-following, participation, problem-solving, inhibition of behavior, and investment of time in engagement and learning.
Applying effort and importance to design. The key is to let children question the role of effort and delayed gratification in their daily lives and enable extrinsic motivation mechanisms that are supported with long-term goals that require time and perseverance to achieve. It is also important to help children actualize their own potential and recognize the outcomes of their long-term habits. One good example of this are digital games that make children responsible for taking care of something (e.g., a digital pet or plant), which also let them acknowledge the fact that effort takes time, and that purposeful goals are accomplished gradually through a series of tasks.
Perceived competence. This is the feeling of accomplishment that comes from completing a difficult task or mastering a new skill. One way to foster perceived competence is to help children be confident enough in their existing competencies that they feel comfortable carrying out challenging tasks, either to become more advanced in their existing skills or to build new skills. It is also important to provide room for improvement outside of daily routines or tasks that lets them reflect on their own competencies and set goals to achieve new skills.
Applying perceived competence to design. Technology enables quick and constructive feedback, allowing children to see the results of their efforts in real time. This immediate feedback loop can help children better understand their progress and achievements. Examples include visualizing their progress (e.g., progress bars displayed during digital games) or raising awareness of various learning goals they can set to gain mastery of new skills or improve their cognitive, physical, social, or emotional skills.
Pressure and tension. These factors pertain to having the resilience to deal with challenges that are difficult but still appropriate for one's skill level. When designing for children, incorporating elements of pressure and tension should be approached with sensitivity to their developmental stages, emotional well-being, and educational goals. The idea is to create challenges that allow room for growth by using problem-solving, strategic or tactical planning, and/or reasoning.
Applying pressure and tension to design. Start with achievable challenges that match the children's current skill level and gradually increase in difficulty as they progress. Introduce new concepts or skills incrementally, providing a scaffolded learning experience that builds on what they already know. Incorporate time constraints, obstacles, or competition elements in game-based learning environments, real-world simulations, or everyday tasks in a playful manner. The key is to balance pressure and tension with moments of enjoyment to keep the overall experience positive.
Perceived choice. This occurs when people are allowed to have a say in what happens and feel that their views or preferences are valued. Choice is linked to children's intrinsic motivation with respect to their innate need for autonomy and a sense of control over their environment. When children feel that they have some agency and that their opinions or preferences matter, they show enhanced engagement, a stronger sense of ownership over tasks, increased responsibility, and more-genuine interest in active participation.
Applying perceived choice in design. Providing children with a controlled level of autonomy can include, but is not limited to, giving them choices for developing their decision-making mechanisms and self-determination abilities and giving them the freedom to discover what they like and dislike. Interaction design can also offer children customization options to personalize their own experiences. For instance, allowing children to create their own avatars or design or select the settings, characters, or tools in a storytelling environment or game narrative are good ways to provide room for them to form and implement their preferences while engaging with technology.
Value and usefulness. These refer to meaningful experiences that relate to people's lives, purposes, or goals that drive them to connect their actions. Intrinsic goals, driven by personal values and desires, are powerful motivators. Being aware of one's own values, principles, and desires is important for developing a sense of alignment between actions and personal interests and goals. When children are encouraged to identify their own values, they perceive that what they are learning or doing has value and relevance to their lives, goals, or interests.
Applying value and usefulness to design. This can be achieved by encouraging children to discover their own requirements, preferences, desires, and needs while taking an active role in dealing with social problems and recognizing their individual values and priorities. These design choices may directly or indirectly help children achieve self-awareness, such as through board games or digital games that support them learning about different cultures or professions or other species. Incorporating diverse values in these materials can encourage reflection on how certain activities or knowledge align with children's personal values. Moreover, learning how to understand and act ethically on (more-than) human values in design, as well as developing educational materials for the role that values play in the HCI field is gaining importance [6]. This approach could be extended to children, as they are the users and designers of current and future technologies.
Opportunities to Foster Children's Intrinsic Motivation
Moving engagement beyond extrinsic factors (e.g., badges, scores, likes) in HCI, and in CCI in particular, is challenging yet vital. The challenging part is to evaluate what the genuine motivations are in children's engagement or interactions with technology. Most of the time it is difficult to filter out the initial fascination or novelty effect of an emerging technology, or the external reward systems that maintain a drive to advance a skill in the long run. There are some design elements, however, that may play an effective role in supporting intrinsic motivation, such as providing a sense of immersion, customized experiences, or social interaction.
Distraction is one of the key areas of research in the study of engagement and learning, as children's normal environments often require constant multitasking. Findings suggest that creating immersive exercises, such as ones that involve physical activity, or experiences, such as soothing ones in closed spaces during medical treatments, can contribute to a more positive attitude toward that activity and increase the likelihood of regular engagement. Thus, an increased sense of immersion provided by an experience or technology such as embodied interaction, gesture-based interactions, augmented or virtual reality, or sensory feedback may offer children minds-on learning activities to focus their attention on the task and feel less distracted by the peripheral elements.
Social interaction revolves around high-quality interactions (e.g., those with more knowledgeable social partners or in collaborative learning situations with peers) that are contingent and adaptable to the child [3]. Fostering collaboration by designing challenges that require teamwork and communication would also be effective in infusing a sense of shared accomplishments. Designing platforms that facilitate experience or information exchange, collaborative learning, and teamwork can create environments for high-quality interactions. Videoconferencing and other real-time communication tools can connect children with their family members, teachers, or friends. Features such as discussion forums, virtual group projects, and shared document editing can mediate and enhance social engagement. These tools enable instant feedback, clarification, and discussions, fostering a supportive learning community. Knowing that others appreciate and value one's contributions can enhance intrinsic motivation. By creating digital environments that support meaningful social interactions and collaborative learning, technology can be a powerful ally in cultivating and sustaining intrinsic motivation in children.
Technology allows for learning experiences to be personalized by adapting content to individual needs and learning styles. Tailoring educational materials to a child's pace and preferences can enhance their intrinsic motivation by providing a more relevant and enjoyable learning environment. This may also ensure that challenges remain appropriately difficult while avoiding frustration or boredom. Moreover, it is important to support children in recognizing what they value, prioritizing critical reflection on technology design and use in alignment with their values. Designing challenges that are perceived as meaningful and related to personal goals can encourage children to tackle them with intrinsic motivation.
Engaging children in activities that align with their interests and values is a foundational step in cultivating intrinsic motivation. Reflect upon what truly drives them, explore new information, develop different skills, and carve out time for activities that leverage their sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The internal and external factors described here are where intrinsic motivation meets technological development and design for children. Utilizing the constructs of intrinsic motivation as pillars to guide researchers and designers can yield evidence-based design choices for CCI practices. Moreover, utilizing the constructs as a research-driven guide may also help set standards for balancing between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation and evaluating the interactive tools with respect to children's engagement and learning.
We have not begun to understand the long-term impact of the explosion of technology use among children on their motivation mechanisms. This article offers a way to examine the potential motivational impact of current and future child-computer interaction design solutions. It emphasizes how the design and use of technology aligns with known processes of intrinsic motivation in children's learning and engagement and presents a framework that can be used not only by researchers and designers but also parents. Providing room for children to develop a sense of interest and enjoyment, perceived competence, persistence and commitment, perceived choice, achievable challenges, and meaningful purposes within the context of a supported learning goal could be considered pillars of intrinsic motivation for interaction design. These may serve as a set of useful design principles to cultivate children's intrinsic motivation by providing experiences, tools, or services that are satisfactory and meaningful for them, which is beyond the purview of what we currently consider "engaging" in interaction design.
References
1. Piaget, J. Genetic Epistemology. Columbia Univ. Press, 1970.
2. Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology 25, 1 (2000) 54–67.
3. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Zosh, J.M., Golinkoff, R.M., Gray, J.H., Robb, M.B., and Kaufman, J. Putting education in "educational" apps: Lessons from the science of learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 16, 1 (2015) 3–34.
4. Hourcade, J.P. Child-Computer Interaction. Self, Iowa City, Iowa, 2015.
5. Çelik, D., Albayrak, D., Oğuz, A., Taylan, B., and Baykal, G.E. MotiCards: Developing designer cards for children's intrinsic motivation of daily tasks. Proc. of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference. ACM, New York, 2023, 491–94.
6. Eriksson, E., Nilsson, E.M., Hansen, A-M., and Bekker, T. Teaching for values in human-computer interaction. Frontiers in Computer Science 4 (Feb. 2022), 830736.
Author
Gökçe Elif Baykal is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Design at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She holds a Ph.D. in design, technology, and society from Koç University. Her research focuses on incorporating developmental and educational theories into interaction design methods in the child-computer interaction field. [email protected]
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