IQsha_joint opening of the website for Ivan's studies

The interaction happens at the beginning of the very first day of Ivan and Anastasia’s video-recordings in September 2020. Ivan first asks his mother why they use a specific screen-recording program, because there are two similarly-looking icons for this program on the desktop.

After setting up the eyetracker and launching the screen recording, Anastasia suggests that Ivan help her with printing some documents related to her studies . While only using the eyetracker for a couple of months by that time, Ivan had learnt how to print out Word documents using the eyetracker and Optikey app, and Anastasia would sometimes ask him to print documents for her. In our zoom-interviews of that time, Anastasia would mention, often with a tone of a proud mother, this skill as one of the things that Ivan could do himself on the computer, along with navigating YouTube, playing his games and music. It may also be that since this is the first day of the recordings, Anastasia felt compelled to suggest activities to Ivan to “fill in” this initial time of the recording.

Although Ivan can do many things on his own on the computer, he still invites Anastasia’s assistance on various occasions in this digital realm. In this sequence, Ivan recruits Anastasia’s help to open IQsha.ru – an educational website that he and his teacher have worked at during their homeschooling time. At this point of his literacy development, Ivan can’t type the name of the website in the browser on his own. Moreover, the name of the website is not pinned to the list of Ivan’s favorite resources on top of the browser that he uses to open his most “go-to websites”.

Meanwhile some confusion happens, since Anastasia suggests to Ivan two competing activities: that he plays his own games (i.e. does his online studies) AND that he prints out documents related to Anastasia’s studies at a grad program in psychology.