"Quero Fazer": A Game Featured Platform for Early Childhood Informal Education

Abstract

The widespread adoption of home-schooling around the world precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic has brought afloat the inequalities in household environment and parental support to early childhood education and care (ECEC) that, according to research, much contribute to uneven childhood education and future social mobility opportunities. With new trends of remote work emerging and predictively prevailing beyond the compulsory confinements, and extended learning delays to recover by children, it is expected that increasingly flexible childcare arrangements are to be demanded by society to fit this new reality - addressing simultaneously long-time concerns from academia and society about the importance of parental involvement and individualized, and child-led, informal learning practices in ECEC. It is proposed the study, co-design and early impact assessment of (1) a nursery- and primary- school-home digital communication platform to facilitate the reveal and setup of relevant informal education activities based on children's own formal education goals and their household's resources - human, spatial and material -, and (2) a serious game, mounted on top of this platform, to motivate and empower young children to be the drivers of their own informal education programs, by leveraging storytelling and role-play over an interface that is accessible and intelligible to them.