Digital Kids: how children are using devices, apps and media

A day-long liveblog covering the latest research, trends and views on children's changing media habits

Children in 2013 are often as comfortable with tablets, apps and digital media as their parents. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian

Welcome to Digital Kids day

The liveblog has now ended, and flipped back to chronological order. Thanks for reading!
Kids these days, eh? If they're not swiping your tablet and filling it with their own apps, they're playing Moshi Monsters, surfing YouTube, creating chicken-packed Minecraft castles or learning to code. Digital natives is an overused buzzphrase, but it's still accurate.
It's an area worth further attention for parents, teachers and anyone else involved in creating digital education and/or entertainment for children. There is plenty of research, trends and companies to talk about in the area.
So, Digital Kids day: a liveblog that will run through until the evening, blending research links, videos, infographics and snapshots of previous Guardian coverage on children's changing media habits, as well as some first-hand views from kids.
Your views will be part of it too. Post comments on what's been covered and make your own recommendations; join the conversation on Twitter using the #digitalkids hashtag; or email me your thoughts and tips at stuart.dredge@theguardian.com. It's a bit of an experiment, but hopefully interesting and worthwhile.

Updated at 4.32pm GMT

9.12am GMT

Ofcom's latest Media Literacy report

Let's kick off the research element to today with the latest report by UK telecoms regulator Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes came out in early October, and has masses of data on how British children are getting their entertainment across different devices.
There's no way to summarise all its contents here, but the tablet stats are particularly noteworthy:

"Around one quarter of children aged 12– 15 (26%) and 18% aged 8-11 have their own tablet computer, while household ownership of a tablet has more than doubled since 2012 (51% vs. 20%). Use of a tablet computer at home has tripled among 5-15s since 2012 (42% vs.14%) while one-quarter (28%) of 3-4s use a tablet computer at home."

Also note that children are now less likely than in 2012 to have a television, games console or radio in their bedrooms. Are tablets leading them back to the living room?

Ofcom's latest figures on tablet ownership and usage by British children. Photograph: /Ofcom

Common Sense Media's infographic on children's daily screen time and app use. Graphic: Common Sense Media

How about kids in America? Kim Wilde is on my internal jukebox for the rest of the morning now, but it's well worth reading the survey released earlier this week by Common Sense Media, based on a survey of 1,463 parents of children aged eight and under.
It notes a big spike in tablet ownership for US families in the last two years: "Among families with children eight and under, there has been a five-fold increase in ownership of tablets (from 8% to 40%), and the percent of children with access to some sort of smart mobile device at home has jumped from half (52%) to three-quarters (75%)."
The research has also made headlines for its finding that 38% of children under two years old have used a mobile device, up from 10% in 2011. Too young? My kids may have swiped a jammy hand across my tablet every so often when they were toddlers, but I'm not sure they actually "used" it.

Can Minecraft create the next generation of quantum scientists?

 

Heard of qCraft? It's the work of Google's Quantum A.I. Lab: a modpack for Minecraft – a game that's hugely popular among children – that aims to get kids interested in quantum physics. "Where will future quantum computer scientists come from? Our best guess: Minecraft," explained Google when it unveiled qCraft earlier this month. "Millions of kids are spending a whole lot of hours in Minecraft, not just digging caves and fighting monsters, but building assembly lines, space shuttles, and programmable computers, all in the name of experimentation and discovery. So how do we get these smart, creative kids excited about quantum physics?"

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Children's network SuperAwesome has been travelling the country asking children about their digital media usage. Here's one of its findings (it's tweeting more throughout the day, apparently).

Question: where to start teaching my kids to code?

 

The photo above really is my six year-old's first ever attempt at coding yesterday – with genuinely no input from me about what he should type between the quote marks. Let's just say I had something in my eye for a few minutes after seeing it.
We'd just set up The Fuze, a computer for kids based on Raspberry Pi, which has an emphasis on teaching children BASIC. It's good so far, but it made me wonder: what are your recommendations for children taking their first steps in coding?
What languages are good to start with – I've been mulling Scratch, but am open to suggestions. Any thoughts on the merits of initiatives like Code Club and Fire Tech Camp? Or apps like Hopscotch, Light-bot and Hakitzu? Post a comment if you have views.

Talking of Raspberry Pi...

 

This video posted on the Raspberry Pi blog is marvellous: Seven year-old Amelia and five year-old Oliver have used Raspberry Pi to "rig up their house to scare any trick-or-treaters who might visit tomorrow" (i.e. today). More instructions on how they did it can be found here.

Kantar: 48% of UK adults in households with children have a tablet

Some more research, this time from Kantar Media's recent FutureProof study, which found that 48% of adults in households with children have a tablet. It also posed a question about the implications:
"Devices like tablets have made technology accessible to young children and while parents are conscious that their kids need to be digitally literate, there's also a concern around the wide open world that these devices provide access to."

Word-cloud time: what are children in Stratford doing online?

 

What online games are 11-16 year-old children playing?

Moshi Monsters is marvellous, but does it skew younger? You might think so, but research from another British firm, Dubit, found earlier this year that 10% of 11-16 year-olds here were still playing it, while 17% were on Disney's Club Penguin.
That said, adult games were creeping in too: 7% on Runescape and 6% on World of Warcraft, although the fashion-focused Stardoll virtual world also had a decent audience.

Online games played by 11-16 year-olds from Dubit

Apps, games and YouTube. But what about reading?

One of the most interesting yet controversial pieces of research into children's use of devices and digital media this year came from Nielsen Book.
It surveyed 2,000 British children and parents in June, and found that 32% of kids still read books for pleasure on a daily basis, behind only watching TV (36%) and ahead of social networking (20%), watching videos on YouTube (17%) and playing mobile games and apps (16%).
But... "There's a really disturbing pattern beginning to emerge when you look on a weekly basis," said Nielsen Book's Jo Henry when she presented the research at The Bookseller Children's Conference in September.
As I wrote at the time:

Only three activities increased in percentage terms between 2012 and 2013: playing "game apps" (the term used by Nielsen Book), visiting YouTube and text messaging. Reading? That was down nearly eight percentage points.
"It's a snapshot, not a sustainable trend and next year it might go up again. But this is alarming: children are being less engaged with reading," said Henry, who also pointed to industry figures showing an 8% year-on-year drop in (printed) books bought for children.
"I want to stress that most children are still medium and heavy book readers, but what we're seeing is a really significant rise in the number of occasional and even non-readers in the children's market."

With my own children, I've tried very hard to help them love reading as much as apps and games: books not screens at bedtime, for example. And there's also a growing number of excellent apps designed to encourage reading too. But what are your thoughts?

Another suggestion for your children's first steps in coding

Stuart Dredge @stuartdredge

Here’s my child’s first ever attempt at coding, but what languages/apps/clubs could be his next step? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/31/digital-kids-devices-apps-media#block-52722356e4b051882ae4f64d … #digitalkids

@stuartdredge might be a couple of years to young, but you should give @ProcessingOrg a look, they have an amazing community #digitalkids

Nielsen on children's educational use of tablets

More research from Nielsen, but this time the parent company. It asked American parents about their children's tablet use, and found 54% saying their kids use the devices for educational purposes. It also dug into what children are doing with tablets at school:

Sorry, no Angry Birds... Image: Nielsen

I'm enjoying the word-clouds from SuperAwesome: this time, favourite TV characters for kids in Stratford. Is it too late for the BBC to make Gary Lineker the next Doctor Who?

What next for Moshi Monsters as its users migrate to tablets?

Children's virtual world Moshi Monsters has 70m registered users, but it's facing a tricky time as its young users migrate to tablets. Earlier this month, CEO Michael Acton Smith talked about the challenges this is presenting.

"I'll be honest, it's been really tough. We thought we'd waltz in and have a successful app, and as most people have found, that universe is really tough. It's great because anyone can create an app, but that's why it's tough. There's so much content... Where I see more our competitors emerging from are definitely in the App Store, everything from Talking Tom to Temple Run to Angry Birds, these extraordinary apps getting tens of millions of downloads. That's where kids are spending a lot of their time these days."

The company is still working on its fully-fledged tablet app for Moshi Monsters, but mobile looms large in its plans for new, non-Moshi worlds and characters too. It's working on three new projects, all of which will be mobile-first.

"They will always start, these new brands, in the mobile and tablet space. And if they're successful then we will start expanding them into different media... Some of the apps we launch will use in-app purchases, some will be paid apps, and some will be completely free and used to generate revenue through making characters more popular."

There's more in The Guardian's interview with Acton Smith, including his belief that children's apps can build business models based on in-app purchases in an ethical way, despite recent controversies around kids splashing their parents' cash on virtual items without permission.

Play-i's toy robots hoping to help kids learn to code

 

 

Play-i is a US startup that's just launched a $250k crowdfunding campaign for its two robots – Bo and Yana – which will help children learn to code in the Scratch and Blockly languages using apps, music and games (as in physical games: the robots can play tag and hide'n'seek). The robots will be shipping in the summer of 2014, although developers can get early access to the products and their API. Three days in, and Play-i has already raised $218k of its target.

The power of Minecraft for kids

 

Any word-cloud about what kids are doing digitally will see Minecraft looming large, as above. Angry Birds, Temple Run, FIFA and Minion Rush all feature too.
The latter is somewhat under the radar for the wider games industry, but Despicable Me: Minion Rush (to give its full title) is something of a mobile monster: 100m downloads in three months on iOS and Android earlier this year.
And while we're on the subject of Minecraft, I can't recommend highly enough my colleague Keith Stuart's recent feature – Minecraft at 33 million users – a personal story – in which he talked about his own child's experience with the game:

"This is particularly resonant to me, and I suspect many other parents with autistic children. My seven-year-old son, Zac, was confirmed on the scale earlier this year, although in a lot of ways we've always known. He has a somewhat limited vocabulary, and finds noisy social situations like schoolyards frightening and confusing; he is demonstrative, but has difficulty with empathy. We have watched as his younger brother, Albie, has overtaken him on things like reading and writing. But he is funny and imaginative and wonderful.
And like a lot of children with an autism spectrum condition, he loves Minecraft. From the moment I downloaded the Xbox 360 edition and handed controllers to him and his brother Albie, they have been addicts. At first, they simply trudged across the rolling landscapes, randomly attacking the sheep, cows and ducks that graze each Minecraft world. They would throw together weird hovels, filled with random doors and windows, huge gaps in the walls, bizarre jutting extensions, like nightmarish sets from a German expressionistic horror movie."

Architecture in 2030 is going to be an interesting thing, if the Minecraft generation are putting their skills to use in the real world.