How parents read young learners’ digital engagement: a posthumanist inquiry into the temporality of co-evolving learning practices in AI game space

Much research on children's digital gameplay focuses on measuring detrimental effects, excluding more complex relational dynamics of family literacy practices. Approaches that focus on how families adapt available resources in novel and resilient ways to suit their own socio-cultural aspirations are under-utilised. We partnered with game developers to investigate how parents view emerging AI capacity within games for young children, particularly the degree to which technology increasingly constructs a digital self of users. A story-based learning game with machine learning capacity that adapts to children’s skills and interests was trialled with eleven families. Observations, focus groups and exit survey gave important. insight into the ways families adapt traditional literacy practices in game space, and their understanding of AI developments including the tensions they felt between concerns about surveillance, on the one hand, and their desire that children not miss out or fall behind their peers’ developing digital literacy.