Promoting dental care to children using traditional and interactive media following threat appeals

In recent years, computer games have become an important part of children’s lives. Gaming is not only one of their favorite pastime activities, but games are also increasingly used by marketers in an attempt to influence children’s purchase behavior. Today, almost every food and beverage brand targeting children has an advergame on its website. Advergames are “computer games specifically created to function as advertisements to promote brands”, containing brand identifiers such as logos and brand characters (Kretchmer, 2005: 7). Games can also be powerful learning tools. Several authors (e.g., Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2001) argue that computer games can be more enjoyable, more interesting and thus more effective than traditional learning modes to increase children’s knowledge. Empirical studies that evaluated the impact of the use of games within disciplines such as mathematics, science, language, geography and computer science show positive outcomes in terms of learning effectiveness in relation to curricular objectives (e.g., Papastergiou, 2009; Rosas et al., 2003). However, these authors mainly focus on the learning ability of games rather than their persuasive impact for social marketing purposes. In the area of health education, playing computer games has often been seen with skepticism (e.g., Bale, 1994; Funk and Buchman, 1995)

Evaluating YouTube videos for young children

YouTube has become a popular digital media platform used by young children. However, concerns have been raised around inappropriate video content and limited quality. A lack of research and theoretical discussion exists on how best to evaluate the quality of YouTube videos made for children. In this study, we reviewed research and developed a set of design principles that informed the production of a YouTube video rubric used to evaluate the quality of YouTube videos targeted at young children 0 to 8 years old. The four key evaluation criteria used are: Age appropriateness, Content quality, Design features, and Learning objectives. This evaluation tool has the potential to be used by educators to assess the quality of videos for early learning and guide YouTube creators in their production of educational videos for young children