Centre-UB Challenge Day 2026
The day focused on the theme of Digital Future Childhoods and was built around a question that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: What does growing up in a digital world mean for children? The day aimed to tackle the complexity of this question, exploring how the relationship between children and digital technologies are shaped by varying factors, including: children’s vulnerabilities, policy contexts, family and social environments, schools, commercial interests and more.
During the day, Dr Marie-Louise Sharp, Professor Jet Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Professor Jessica Woodhams presented on a range of theories to understand behaviour, explaining how they had used them in their own behavioural interventions.
This was followed by Professor Victoria Goodyear who explained that the current evidence reporting on children’s engagement with digital technologies is mainly correlational and drawn from observational studies, presenting a challenge for decision makers, as there is a lack of rigorous causal evidence to inform current policies or practices.
Teams of PhD students and fellows worked together to create a research proposal to understand the future of digital childhoods from differing perspectives, drawing on the theories and methods they had heard about earlier in the day. At the end of the day, each team presented to a panel of judges who included Professor Dominique Moran (PVC-Impact), Freya Gadsen-Bolton (Go Science, Policy Advisor), Abi Edmunds (Social Media Resilience), Tim Mayo (Communications Manager, UoB), and Dr Bethany Skinner (Post-Doctoral Behavioural Researcher).
The winning team were PARENTS (Parents Attitude, Reasoning, Emotions, Negotiations for Technology and Screen use) who were very happy with their Amazon vouchers!
View highlights of the day here: https://youtu.be/fXQoB_i9YZM
Read a full summary here: