The University of Washington is the global leader in the study of youth experiences with technology. Children and teens increasingly leverage interactive technologies for learning, connection, and play, making it more important than ever to understand how these systems shape the lives of young people. Convergent hiring across five campus units has led to unmatched breadth and depth of expertise in child and adolescent wellbeing online, learning sciences, child-computer interaction, and computer science education. In 2012, the Digital Youth Lab began as a small group of researchers housed in the Information School, but it has since expanded to a cross-campus, grassroots community of more than 80 faculty members, research scientists, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students.
Read a report by Negin Dahya and Jin Ha Lee on the role of virtual reality in public libraries. Study funded by Washington State Libraries, Office of the Secretary of State, and Oculus.
Virtual Reality Art & Design Curriculum: Read researchers' report on how to explore virtual reality creation through art making and world building.
How do I get involved in research?
DYL faculty and students work on a wide variety of projects and initiatives related to children, education, and technology usage, which you can read about in more detail on our Research page and the Project menu. You can also reach out to any of our members for more information on their research or curent projects.
Community Engagement
The Digital Youth Lab has already established infrastructure to study the future of youth technology together in partnership with children, teens, and families. We also feed our research findings back into the community through community-based outreach and programming.
Cross-campus, interdisciplinary team
Our faculty leaders are primarily based in the University of Washington’s Information School (iSchool) and Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE). We also have several PhD students working on a variety of projects in the digital youth space, as well as collaborators from universities across the country.