Dancing Panda’s Design Principles Research Brief

Design Principles

Dancing Panda was created to support parents, families and educators with resources and tools to help support student learning in a fun and easy way. This research brief is provided for Dancing Panda users who are interested in exploring the topics that are essential to the creation of Dancing Panda. Currently, Dancing Panda has identified 3 broad topics that are relevant to the company’s design principles that inform the product design: Learning & Play (“playful learning”), Parent & Family Engagement, and DEI (Disparity, Equity, Inclusion).


Learning & Play

How We Are Learning

According to “Guided Play: Principles and Practices” by Weisberg et al. (2016), guided play leads to better child development outcomes than other types of learning because it combines elements of free play and direct instruction, which will allow children to freely explore concepts within certain dimensions. Through our fun and interactive Dancing Panda activities, children, with some parent guidance, will be able to grasp new concepts and further develop crucial learning-to-learn skills. For example, in “Da Doo Ron Ron”, a second grade ELA activity, the children are to listen to a song and explore special vowel sounds. Based on the level of completion of the task, the parents can then guide the children to either do an easier exercise on the same vowel sounds, or a harder one that focuses on other vowel teams. Instead of teaching their kids to memorize the vowels directly, caregivers act as facilitators to help the children remember the concepts creatively and apply what they learned in a practical manner (eg. Finding vowels in the lyrics).

Similarly, in “Learning Through Play: A Review of the Evidence”, researchers Zosh et al. (2017) discuss how characteristics of joy, meaning, iteration, social interaction, and active engagement in playful learning experiences foster children’s dynamic learning development. On top of being generally children-led, which allow kids to be active learners, Dancing Panda activities are fun and enjoyable. Our games are designed to evoke children’s interest and excitement about learning. One second grader commented, “I love Dancing Panda games! When is the next one coming? I can’t wait!”

Another aspect of playful learning is its connection to children’s real-life experiences (i.e. its “meaningfulness”). Zosh et al. (2017) have found that children must learn to connect the illusory fact to something in real life in order to move past rote learning to more meaningful understanding. Every Dancing Panda activity is an epitome of such a fact: each game is built upon everyday situations that kids may encounter. For example, in a second grade math exercise, “26 Cents”, the child is asked to imagine spending coins to buy stickers from a store.

Another source, “Accessing the Inaccessible: Redefining Play as a Spectrum” (Zosh et al., 2018) provides a multidimensional definition of play and actively illustrates it through a spectrum (Fig. 1). On the left end of the spectrum lies “free play”, which is initiated and directed by the child; on the right end lies “direct instruction”, which is initiated and directed by the adult. The researchers argue that “guided play”, which lies near the left end of the spectrum, maximizes learning because it “harnesses active, minds-on thinking, engagement, meaning-making, joy, and iteration” (Zosh et al., 2018). The main characteristics of “guided play” are that it is initiated by the adult but directed by the child. Such an emphasis on autonomy ensures that children are engaged during the activities, especially for younger children who often get distracted. Dancing Panda activities are mostly directed by children with occasional guidance from adults and usually only take 5-10 minutes to complete, an optimal time for kids who have shorter attention spans.

The researchers also define “play” as “an activity in which the focus is not the end-state or a goal, but the means themselves” (Zosh et al., 2018). Dancing Panda follows the same belief and structures our games so that completion is not the end goal, but rather the process of playing and interacting is. Our activities include easier and harder versions, enabling children to adjust the difficulty levels of the same task. By doing so, children will feel less pressured to finish an activity that might have concepts that are too hard for them to grasp yet; in the end, they can always re-do the activity when they feel more ready.

In “The Brain Basis for Integrated Social, Emotional, and Academic Development: How Emotional and Social Relationships Drive Learning” (Immordino-Yang et al., 2018), the researchers elucidate that healthy social relationships, emotional experiences, and cognitive opportunities are required factors behind a good and complete brain development. As stated in the article, “The quality of a person’s relationships and social interactions shapes their development and health, both of the body and of the brain” (Immordino-Yang et al., 2018). Thus, children are in an optimal learning condition when they interact with family members or with people who they have a strong relationship with.

In addition to constructing interactive conditions for children to practice their socio-emotional capabilities with families, Dancing Panda also empowers children to gain acquired, executive functioning abilities through entertaining exercises. For example, in the “Family Rules” activity discussed earlier, a second grade child uses adaptable thinking to brainstorm family-rule ideas from their own perspective. Referring to an accurate analogy in the paper, which compares the developmental sculpting of the brain’s network to the process of growing a botanical garden; the local conditions are compared to children’s learning environments and the gardeners’ skills are compared to teachers and parents’ abilities to pass on knowledge (Immordino-Yang et al., 2018).

What We Are Learning

In “Lego Foundation: What We Mean by Learning Through Play”, the research findings highlight children’s abilities to re-skill and do lifelong learning, which are essential to adapt to today’s society. “An increasingly interconnected and dynamic world means children today will find themselves changing jobs several times during their lives” (Zosh et al., 2017). For these evolving skill developments, Dancing Panda is also constantly producing relevant activities and placing emphasis on all aspects of a child’s growth. Dancing Panda focuses on enhancing children’s physical, cognitive, creative, social, and emotional skills by offering exercises on different subjects - Math, Science, Social Studies, English, Music, Arts, and Wellness. We expect each subject to help strengthen an individual skill, and together, shape a comprehensive set of abilities.

Dancing Panda values the development of the skills mentioned in “Lego Foundation: What We Mean by Learning Through Play” (Zosh et al., 2017). To improve children’s physical skills, Dancing Panda offers Wellness activities. For instance, in “Skip to My Lou”, a second grade Wellness exercise, the parents and children interact through a series of physical movements (skipping, linking arms, turning in a circle, and moving with the music). For more cognitive and creative skill developments, the children can participate in Dancing Panda’s discussion-based activities. In “Family Rules”, a first grade Social Studies exercise, the children discuss existing family rules with their parents, and then imagine themselves as grownups to further brainstorm rules to add. Lastly, focusing on children’s social and emotional abilities, Dancing Panda has established the current activity structure, allowing for more social interactions with others during the games.

The Building Blocks for Learning Model (Fig. 2), designed by Stafford-Brizard in “Building Blocks for Learning”, represents a set of skills/mindsets that build on top of one another to facilitate and foster children’s success in school and life. At the bottom of the model are foundational skills that impact children’s health development. It is noteworthy that all of them relate to a healthy, close relationship with parents, which will in turn largely affect children’s relationships with others and the world. As stated by Stafford-Brizard , “When students face adversity and stress in their home environments and/or fail to access a quality early childhood education, the development of cognitive and social-emotional skills and mindsets is at risk.” 

Based on this research, Dancing Panda has strongly emphasized parents' involvement in our activities. From watching dancing tutorials together to discussing famous pieces of art, Dancing Panda intentionally includes parents throughout children’s learning process, creating more opportunities for adults who have strong social/emotional connections with the children to guide them when they encounter new concepts or difficulties.

Parent & Family Engagement

Dancing Panda believes that parent and family engagement is an essential component of children’s learning. By adapting our current activity structure and finding other ways of parent inclusion, Dancing Panda builds conditions in which children can learn more effectively, comfortably, and joyfully.

“A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement” (Henderson & Mapp, 2002) is a comprehensive parent and family engagement source that contains summaries of different research studies, as well analyses of study results that convey the practical ways in which caregivers and educators can foster students’ academic and social success. Apart from the important educational findings already discussed in the brief, Dancing Panda has also gained two other pertinent insights from this paper.

“We want to recognize that all family members --- siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and ‘fictive kin’ who may be friends or neighbours --- often contribute in significant ways to children’s education and development” (Henderson & Mapp, 2002). This is a quote in the article that adheres to Dancing Panda’s values, lending credence to the idea of enhancing learning abilities through social interactions. Dancing Panda always states and reminds its users that its activities are for, but not limited to, caregivers, meaning that other family members and close friends can also participate. 

Another finding in the source relates to the design of Dancing Panda activities. In the paper, Henderson and Mapp contend that “many studies of high-performing schools identify several key characteristics associated with improvement. These include high standards and expectations for all students and curriculum, as well as instruction and assessments aligned with those standards.” Similar to what the high-performing schools mentioned do, Dancing Panda also forms activities that match the state standards and school curriculums. In the future, Dancing Panda will create a resource to further inform caregivers what the state standards are and how each specific activity strengthens them.

Through this paper, Dancing Panda also acknowledges the importance of expanding families’ educational and political knowledge bases. Long-term, Dancing Panda will devote a section on its website to educational news or education system changes in the U.S. to keep families aware of what the education boards are doing to support their children.

The paper “Overview of TIPS Interactive Homework” concentrates on a discussion of Teachers Involve Parent In Schoolwork (TIPS) and how implementations of TIPS-specific programs are beneficial for children. TIPS is recognized by many educators as a successful way of involving families in school. It is useful in that it reinforces teacher’s goals for better schoolwork, keeps parents aware of the knowledge children are learning at school, and allows children to build a strong connection between school and home. In such a way, TIPS creates a “three-way partnership, involving students, families, and teachers…” (Epstein, 1995). Through examining the TIPS programs implemented, Dancing Panda recognizes their success and the educational value of TIPS. There are many similarities between existing TIPS programs and Dancing Panda’s service structure: from frequently assigning at-home activities to encouraging parent-child conversations. TIPS is one of the many methods to engage parents in children’s learning, and Dancing Panda aspires to become another.

In “The Effect of Family Literacy Interventions on Children's Acquisition of Reading From Kindergarten to Grade 3: A Meta-Analytic Review”, the authors develop multiple studies to test the effects of parent involvement on children’s reading acquisition. The results of the studies all indicate a positive relationship that is mediated by parent-child reading. They also specify one situation in which the correlation is the strongest: when parents are trained with specific techniques before reading with their children. Instead of purely reading a story to a child, parents can actively read along with the child and provide corrective feedback and praise. 

From these findings, we can see that parents must take a step further to facilitate their children’s learning. The problems, however, that often arise are that caregivers don’t always know how to make that step to improve their education strategies and that there are not enough educational programs to guide/train caregivers. Dancing Panda’s goal is to make learning as easily accessible as possible. We know at Dancing Panda that parents and caregivers have very little time and we know it’s important to make our activities easy-to-use. In addition to providing guidance to parents and caregivers in the actual activities, we also have and will be creating blog posts and tips to help families gain a better understanding on the approaches to take when interacting with their children. For example, in our “How to Talk to Your Older Kids About Juneteenth and Slavery” blog post, our founder & CEO Deb Lee talks to parents about how to have a serious and meaningful discussion of race with their kids. Through the existing educational resources and even more to come in the future, we hope that caregivers will be able to obtain easy techniques that can further advance their children’s learning abilities.

“Know Your Parents: A Global Study of Family Beliefs, Motivations, and Sources of Information on Schooling” (Winthrop & Ershadi, 2021) is a resource Dancing Panda uses to understand parents’ attitude towards the current education curriculum and incorporation of family engagement into schoolwork. The paper provides insights of different surveys done on nearly 25,000 parents across 10 countries that would determine caregivers’ “general beliefs, motivations, and sources of information with respect to their children’s education” (Winthrop & Ershadi, 2021).

Two most significant and relevant discoveries of the study are that 1. In addition to academic success, parents are increasingly valuing their children’s economic and socio-emotional developments, and 2. Parents don’t often rely on each other as important sources of information about the quality of their children’s education, suggesting that they “may be devaluing their important position as agents of change in the education system” (Winthrop & Ershadi, 2021). 

Regarding the first finding, Dancing Panda has adjusted its service structure to adapt to the changes in parents’ thinking. For example, upon receiving feedback from families that children’s mental health developments should also be emphasized in the activities, Dancing Panda changed its 7th educational sector “Movement”, which only had games to enhance physical skills, to “Wellness”, which integrated mindful activities like yoga and meditation.

The second revelation of the study has led to a recent addition to Dancing Panda’s resources for caregivers. Hoping to encourage more communication among families, Dancing Panda will be creating an online community for parents and caregivers. This will provide an opportunity for families to share how they are using Dancing Panda, learn from one another, and rely on Dancing Panda as a reputable education and learning resource.

“Collaborating to Transform and Improve Education Systems”, which is a playbook that focuses on offering ways of understanding the full landscape of family-school engagement strategies, emphasizes that “families and schools have equally important, and mutually supporting roles [throughout a child’s learning]” (Winthrop et al., 2021). One study in the book shows the result that “schools with strong family engagement are ten times more likely to improve student learning outcomes” (Winthrop et al. 2021). Dancing Panda, as a new technology, can support caregivers by allowing their children to do as much learning outside of the classroom as they are inside. 

Another study in the book points to the effectiveness of communicating with families through text messaging: “behavioral economists have demonstrated the significant impact when schools send families ‘nudges’ by either letter or text message, which can increase students’ attendance, reduce dropouts, and sometimes improve learning” (Kraft & Rogers, 2015). The results of this study explain the design principles of Dancing Panda’s text messaging system. Not only does text messaging involve caregivers in children’s learning process, but it also does it in a way that is easily accessible to most families.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI)

DEI influences Dancing Panda greatly in that it is heavily embedded into our core values. Building on a fundamental belief that all children deserve to have a quality education, Dancing Panda strives to create high quality education resources for all caregivers and children. Seeking to celebrate different cultures through our activities, Dancing Panda also hopes that through providing pertinent resources, parents (users) could engage their children with discussions and raise future global citizens. Dancing Panda also wants to live out the core value of DEI by forming a community where all people feel as if they can bring their authentic selves to work and feel respected.

To better understand how to incorporate cultural knowledge into our products, Dancing Panda has referred to “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms”, an academic paper by Moll et al. (1992). “The term ‘funds of knowledge’ [refers] to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al., 1992). Using the aforementioned definition, Dancing Panda is able to refine our games to be more culturally inclusive and appropriate. This act will motivate children’s learning, as they are more able to relate unfamiliar information to their personal experiences in their household and community. One current effort Dancing Panda makes to be global is the opening greeting of every exercise, which is written in a different language and is linked to a webpage that explains the word. For our future and existing activities, Dancing Panda may also modify the game settings to be more comprehensive. For instance, instead of learning fractions through cutting pizzas, children may be able to grasp the concept more easily if the food they are splitting is related to their own culture, such as scallion pancakes or quesadillas. 

Learning from “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1995), Dancing Panda strives to make its activities culturally relevant. In the article, Ladson-Billings argues that “culturally relevant teaching must meet three criteria: an ability to develop students academically, a willingness to nurture and support cultural competence, and the development of a sociopolitical and critical consciousness” (Ladson-Billings, 1995). A live example of incorporating these criteria into everyday teaching is when the teacher not only focus on surface-level cultural speech and language interactions, but also accepts students’ communication patterns, along with a constellation of culture-specific mores (eg. mutuality, reciprocity, spirituality, deference, responsibility, etc.). Upholding the beliefs stated in the paper, Dancing Panda is intentional and strategic about the way in which we ask caregivers to teach and interact with their children. 

Considering that Dancing Panda families may be from different cultural backgrounds, we write our activity explanations and learning connections in a way that doesn’t seem foreign to some caregivers. For instance, in a second grade ELA activity, “The Moral of the Story”, we provide a definition of “fable” for the caregivers before asking them to explain it to their children; we are aware that some of the Dancing Panda families may not be native English speakers and/or may not be familiar with the concept of a “fable”. Similarly, Dancing Panda endeavors to make the “learning connections” section in the activity less academic and easier to read, recognizing that families may have different levels of educational attainment. In the future, Dancing Panda also seeks to create different language versions of the activities to allow even non-English speakers to use our services.

A survey in Wong et al. (2021)’s “Coming Together: Family Reflections on Racism” shows that most children are aware of racism and deepening their understanding of it. On parents and educators' side, however, despite adults’ awareness of the impact of social identities on children’s pathways to success, most are not engaging their children in conversations about these essential issues. It is therefore important for ed-tech companies like Dancing Panda to not only advocate for actions in the larger communities, but also help parents construct a comfortable environment in which both adults and children feel safe and encouraged to engage in discussions of race/ethnicity creatively. 

An example of how DEI is embedded into our work at Dancing Panda is “This is Me”, a second grade art activity. This exercise asks the children to examine self-portrait paintings of others and describe what the paintings look like through answering questions regarding style, color, and impression. Building on the original task, the parents can then ask the children to draw/paint their own self-portraits. The purpose of this activity is to develop children’s understanding of the diverse society, in which respect and tolerance are needed to accept differing views and appearances.

In addition to supporting the larger community on issues of race/ethnicity, Dancing Panda also works toward being an anti-racist multicultural organization itself. Dancing Panda aspires to be the fully inclusive company that is mentioned in “Continuum of Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Organization”, a rubric developed by Jackson and Hardiman. Previous efforts of Dancing Panda to achieve such a goal involve publishing blog posts specifically dedicated to Juneteenth and Atlanta’s Mass Shooting, which teach adults how to effectively communicate with their children about these events.

Likewise, as Dancing Panda grows to become a bigger institution, it will gradually work towards the anti-racist corporation stated in “Dismantling Racism's Organizational Assessment Rubric”, adapting many successful organizational development methods. Specifically, Dancing Panda will think about how to partner up with bigger communities/organizations to design and build social projects/programs that address dynamics of power, inclusion, and exclusion. Moreover, Dancing Panda will continue to find ways to make its decision-making process transparent to its workers and the public, avoiding possible bias and imbalance of power.

Conclusion

This research brief is built to allow the Dancing Panda community to better understand the academic research that drives the rationale behind Dancing Panda’s activities and services. This body of research will continue to expand as Dancing Panda grows to incorporate and make more academic resources accessible to families.