Digital Educational Experiments: Re-conceptualising Families’ Roles as Competent Educators and Co-researchers for STEM Conceptual Development

Over the past few years, the COVID-19 Pandemic has posed new challenges, such as unexpected lockdowns and restricted research site visits to our educational experiments with families. These challenges demand that we develop innovative ways of working remotely with families using digital tools, leading to our development of digital educational experiments in family settings. In digital educational experiments, researchers no longer visit children’s home settings, whereas families take up a more expansive role: they not only take up a pedagogic position for skilfully implementing the Conceptual PlayWorld [CPW] with infant-toddlers but also a co-researcher role for collecting meaningful digital data of CPW sessions for answering relevant research questions. It is not only essential to understand families’ changing roles in digital educational experiments under the new research conditions but also necessary to understand how researchers can come up with a new study design that motivates and empowers families to take up the new educator and co-researcher roles successfully and thus generating high-quality research data for better understanding effective family STEM pedagogy and young children’s STEM conceptual development. This chapter reports a CPW storytelling and mini-workshop study design for a digital educational experiment. It is argued that this new digital educational experiment design opens new possibilities for high-quality remote research with families.