The Emotion Detectives Game: Supporting the Social-emotional Competence of Young Children

Abstract

The potential of digital games to enhance learning in different areas of child development has drawn increasing interest amid growing concern about children's emotional well-being, social-emotional difficulties, and problem behaviors alongside diminishing economic resources for intervention and habilitation. However, digital games designed to promote social-emotional competence are surprisingly scarce. In this chapter, we explore children's use of the digital game Emotion Detectives (ED), designed to promote children's acquisition of emotional knowledge skills (e.g., recognizing, appreciating, and understanding emotions and their expressions), prosocial behaviors (e.g., helping, sharing, comforting, and showing concern for others), and problem-solving abilities. Analyzing children's gameplay sessions in two Finnish day care centers improved understanding of children's gameplay experiences, social-emotional knowledge, and collaborative learning. From the double effect of practicing socialemotional skills simultaneously in the game and in peer interactions, ED has the potential to be an effective learning environment for children. The game's humorous features, creative opportunities, and possibilities to make progress while playing clearly motivated children to learn.

Empowering Young People Living With Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis to Better Communicate With Families and Care Teams: Content Analysis of Semistructured Interviews

“…This distinguishing mPSS feature permits the young person to make note of important preferences, in this case needs, wants, and fears, for subsequent review with friends, family, or care teams. This form of emotional notation and engagement has been linked to childhood development of emotional regulation and positive social engagement [34,35].…”

Social–Behavioral Stories in the Kindergarten Classroom: An App-Based Counseling Intervention for Increasing Social Skills

“…SOBE Stories also allowed kindergarteners to independently complete tasks with little adult intervention, a necessary step in learning how to cope with challenges and promoting empowerment (Trice-Black et al, 2013). Furthermore, educational technology that incorporates digital role-play allowing students to experiment, fail, and try core behaviors again in a low-stakes environment, as in SOBE Stories, is identified as a promising learning tool by technology and educational experts alike (Koivula et al, 2017;Turner et al, 2016). Our results indicated that adding SOBE Stories to the Second Step curriculum resulted in greater improvement in both social skills and problematic behavior than Second Step alone as perceived by teachers.…”

Evaluation of mobile games in the context of content: What do children face when playing mobile games?

“…Of course, we can not expect all studies to produce similar results. However, as Koivula et al (2017) stated, it is a known fact that the educational value of some games is very low since it lacks of principles of game-based learning and pedagogical design.…”

“…It is seen that playing violent digital games is associated with psychosocial problems such as tendency to violence (Williams et al, 2011), a decrease in positive social behavior (Greitemeyer and Mügge, 2014), attention problems (Gentile et al, 2012) and insensitivity towards violence (Montag et al, 2012). The scarcity of digital games aiming at social emotional competence (Koivula et al, 2017) shows it is not surprising. Barlett et al (2008), in a study they did on the game Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, found that games including bloody scenes significantly increased the individual’s attitude towards aggression and physiological arousal.…”

“…All these developments make research on mobile games important. Generally, researchers are not interested in whether the content of digital games is for educational purposes (Koivula et al, 2017). It appears that although mobile games improve some motor/intellectual skills, they also pose risks for children in particular.…”