“The Toy Shop”, a mobile application for detecting and mitigating gender stereotypical thinking in children.

Abstract

Gender stereotypes can be very harmful to young people as their views on the role gender plays in society can have a real impact on their future career prospects and well-being. This project addresses these issues by designing and evaluating a mobile app that has the purpose of detecting and mitigating gender-stereotypical thinking in children. ‘The Toy Shop’ app consists of three different activities that aim at making children reflect and critically think about their gender biases. We designed and tested the app with four domain experts that provide feedback to revise the app. This work aims at contributing to the current discussion on how to design technology-based experiences for children that address the issues related to gender stereotypical thinking and its consequences on children's everyday life.