Children Creating Pedagogical Avatars: Cross-cultural Differences in Drawings and Language

This research identifies cultural differences among children’s drawings especially as related to their drawings of avatars for instructional software. We invited children to draw characters and textual messages within an instructional game, as a way to establish their expectations of pedagogical avatars. We were interested in both the appearance and language of the characters of different nationalities. We describe an experiment that evaluated cultural differences in children’s drawings. We analyzed drawings produced by 57 children aged 7-10 from four countries and discovered several main effects. Specifically, a significant main effect was found for a child’s nationality and gender in predicting the emotion, formality of language, and use of “polite” or nice language. Girls generally expected more details in the hair, skin and facial hair of their characters and drew more emotions (positive) into their characters. Additionally, Pakistani and Argentine boys drew more details and more head coverings than did other children. Girls from Pakistan drew fantasy figures, rather than realistic figures and did not draw headscarves on their characters. The level of detail expected in the characters varied by country.