McNair Scholar 2024 - Alex Ho
Alex Ho is a senior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, majoring in sports management. His research interests center on how people learn through interaction and play. Interaction and communication are something that Alex has been passionate about and is excited to work with a team full of professionals with similar interests as his. Mr. Ho plans on getting his Ph.D. in Development Psychology.
Quote from Alex Ho
My dream is to become the first doctor in my family by earning a Ph.D. in Development Psychology. Ultimately, I want to fulfill my family’s wishes and dreams of being a pioneer in my community and pave a new path of academic success
Research project
Patterns in Family Play
Abstract
In open-ended play-based settings, children propose, adopt, and negotiate different roles and rules as their play progresses, experiencing the process of leading activities by creating the structures of their play. We extended this prior work by studying naturalistic, outdoor family play through detailed analyses of video. Families with children 2-4, who participated in Free Forest School gatherings, recorded and shared videos of their play. We utilized interaction analysis to create a coding framework for capturing their play and moment-to-moment negotiations over roles and rules. We then created transcripts of focal moments that capture participants’ body language and verbal expressions. Preliminary findings suggest that children are the prime leaders when playing. Children constantly come up with new ideas, create variations on activities, establish play patterns, and negotiate changing roles and rules. This study emphasizes the significance of unstructured play in developing leadership, interpersonal, and creative skills for educators, researchers, and parents.
Faculty mentor
Dr. David DeLiema is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Dr. DeLiema attended the University of California, Los Angeles where he received his Ph.D., and then worked as a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley before joining UMN. Dr. DeLiema studies how moments of failure, playful experiences, and embodied cognition shape learning in computer science, family play outdoors, video games, and other STEM domains. Through research-practice partnerships, his research examines cognitive and psychological processes within the context of social interaction, and often takes place within technology-rich settings. This is Dr. DeLiema’s first year being a McNair mentor.