IDC '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Extended Abstracts

Changing dynamics of society along with the evolution of technology require us to accept and embrace the benefits and applications of using digital technology in everyday life. Many international student mothers seek help from digital technology and media for engaging their children so that they can complete their tasks, despite disadvantages associated with early childhood media exposure. Their choice of doing so lies in the lack of affordable and reliable childcare options available to them as an unemployed student, balancing time constraints, as well as cultural, social and academic expectations. My research seeks to explore the use of digital technology and media as childcare assistant, and contributes towards designing safe, affordable and productive digital media applications which can act as a childcare assistant for international student mothers.

The goal of this research is to design a system that encourages a child and robot to collaborate and learn together. My research has two key hypotheses: 1) The expressive motion of an "error-prone," non-humanoid robot can be algorithmically characterized to motivate a child to regularly assist it; 2) An "error prone" robot will provide social motivation for a child to learn and collaborate, which will demonstrably improve the learning outcomes of the child. These two hypotheses will be evaluated via user studies, child-robot interaction analysis, and child learning outcome assessments. Through these analyses, I intend to purposely cultivate the abilities of the robot, such that it can capitalize on the prosocial behavior of a child and minimize its own computational expenses. In so doing, robots can become better collaborators that are more accessible, educational, and cost effective.

With the advancement of technology and the development of new tools, games, applications and social media sites, it is getting difficult every day to keep up with threats and vulnerabilities associated with these tools, apps or websites, especially for children. The goal of this research is to investigate and further develop new knowledge and tools that will be helpful and effective to teach the children about cyber security by performing various gamified actions in a playful, engaging and motivating manner. The methodology of this research would be both qualitative and quantitative, using interviews, questionnaires, focus group and observations. Initially, this project will define the theoretical and existing practices of cyber security awareness education for children. In the next phase, this research will design and implement interventions based on learning activities like workshops and collaborative tasks; followed by empirical test and evaluation of the proposed interventions.

My dissertation project leverages an intelligent conversational agent embodied in an on-screen character to add social contingency into children's science video watching experiences. This conversational agent has been developed in an iterative process and embedded in a new PBS KIDS science show, "Elinor Wonders Why." My research aims to understand the design, feasibility, and promise of virtual conversation with media characters in young children's informal science learning through video watching.

The main aim of this research is to examine engagement in early science learning in the context of a science centre, particularly how and to what extent the process of engagement can be captured and fostered in children aged 4-7 years. This research is testing the potential of a multimodal approach that triangulates data from current (video-recording and engagement scales) and novel tools (head-mounted camera, EDA sensor) capturing engagement simultaneously. By doing this, the approach may also detect which events and variables might characterise engagement, as well as those that could influence it in relation to the learning goal of the activity. Analysis will examine whether there are relationships between data from different tools and whether these lead to find influential triggers that guide engagement, or emerging patterns of activity throughout the interaction. This research has the potential to enhance and facilitate early science learning through improvement of engagement processes.

In science education, the use of computational tools brings many possibilities for collecting, manipulating, and visualizing data, opening new pathways for exploring and making sense of scientific phenomena. However, although new types of data can now be easily accessed and collected for educational purposes, there are still few tools designed for children to make sense of these data in diverse and personally meaningful ways. The present study aims to explore new possibilities for integrating computational and science practices in K-12 education, with a focus on data analysis and visualization, in order to make science learning more relevant, contextualized, and meaningful to students. To this end, we intend to (a) develop a data visualization tool that allows students to engage in new ways of exploring and making sense of data through a block-based programming environment, and (b) codesign with middle school science teachers curricular units that will integrate the tool with the investigation of specific scientific phenomena. Interviews with teachers and students and classroom observations will be analyzed to identify affordances and limitations of the tool, as well as relevant pedagogical strategies and design principles that can guide the development and improvement of similar tools and curricular units.

In recent decades, technological developments related to computing, informatics, and digitization have generated radical changes in our lives. This new reality brings with it the need for children and young people to develop new basic skills linked to what has been called computational thinking. Computational thinking taught from an early age may allow individuals and society to understand and use new conceptual structures and models that represent complex phenomena and processes in the world around us. However, stimulating the development of computational thinking at an early age (preschool) continues to be an academic challenge whose approach requires research, interdisciplinary work, and innovation. My doctoral thesis aims to contribute to the design, development and evaluation of child-robot interaction (including programming interface, interaction context and activities), aimed at promoting the development of computational thinking in preschool children.

The PhD research work targets at designing a technopedagogical learning environment in classrooms using Augmented Reality (AR) technology that incorporates the components of visuospatial thinking (VST) to enhance this skill. In doing so, two topics of Geometry i.e. (1) Visualizing 3D Solids and (2) Lines and Angles have been taken to create the modules of the AR Learning Environment (ARLE) for middle school students. Several pilot studies are being conducted to identify the best possible factors in defining the framework that highlights the essential components for designing such an ARLE for middle school students. Moreover, the research looks into establishing how, why and where AR technology can help in enhancing the pedagogical aspect of learning VST skills.

Embedding electronics and enabling digital responses to everyday objects is already a widespread reality. The term smart toys, tangibles and robots cover a range of play products that can present different levels of network, processing and reasoning capabilities. Such interfaces have also become capable of collecting and processing data in realtime. While quality aspects and intelligent features are more relevant than ever, many relying on data-driven methods and artificial intelligence (AI), this also raises important privacy issues and concerns. Additionally, the design of meaningful play and learning experiences that go beyond data collection remains a challenging task. This workshop aims to explore challenges and related opportunities to feed interaction design of smart toys, tangibles, robots and other smart things for children that may shape the lines for future work in the field. It aims at bringing together researchers, non-academicians and, practitioners from relevant disciplines to discuss potentials and limitations of using various smart technologies for children, to define required methodologies, and to envision alternative future scenarios that fully unleash the potential that the new generation of AI-powered smart tangibles and related devices may bring.

In this one-day workshop, we will explore how food related culture and traditions can guide the design of playful technologies and experiences. Using food as an accessible starting point, we aim to bring together a diverse set of participants in order to share and make creative use of playful traditions and food stuffs through hands-on prototyping, play and discussion. At the end of the day we expect to further advance our methodological inquiry with insights on how children's natural affinity to play can be leveraged in co-design explorations aimed at chasing play potentials in foods and food related practices as well as expand the repository of play-food potentials we have been curating for the past months. Overall the workshop will contribute to enriching the set of tools available for designers interested in play and technologies for everyday use, in and beyond the food domain.

The increasing presence of interactive technologies in children's lives poses critical ethical questions for researchers and designers. Discourse specific to these intersecting topics is nascent, but is spread across communities and largely developed retrospectively. This workshop brings together those interested in ethical issues arising when researching, designing, and deploying technologies for children. The focus is on exploring approaches that are emergent and situated, arising during research or after deployment. Workshop activities will include: exploring ethical themes emerging in HCI research for children; synthesizing and adapting current applicable ethical guidance; identifying gaps; and developing preliminary methods and guidance to address these gaps. Outcomes will extend current best practices in ethics in ways that promote children's protection, empowerment and wellbeing.

Within Child Computer Interaction (CCI), there is an emphasis on empowering children through co-design and co-creation of technology that shapes their learning, inside and outside the classroom, their wellbeing and lifestyles, and everyday experiences. However, the focus has primarily been on now or the near future, with limited work on designing children's future technological life worlds.

This workshop takes a strategic approach towards "designing for the future," this year's conference theme, by reflecting on the past, discussing current trends, and exploring the future. We will further build on critical and/or future-oriented methods such as critical design, speculative design, design fictions, and others. Together with researchers in CCI, in this workshop we will compile a methodological toolbox for the future of IDC; one that enables us to inquire, design, and critically examine children's technological futures together with them.

Despite the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community's rapid growth in the past two decades, there has traditionally been less focus on developing a curriculum to teach CCI to students. This entails a risk for a gap between the accumulation of knowledge and the transfer of this knowledge to new generations of researchers and designers. Building on previous workshops organized at IDC 2011 and 2014, the goal of this workshop is to gauge the current state of teaching CCI to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. More specifically, the workshop aims to re-evaluate previous lessons learned, stimulate reflection on best practices, facilitate an exchange of knowledge, and provide a forum for international collaboration. The envisioned outcome is a blueprint for a CCI curriculum that can be taught anywhere in the world.

This virtual workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from the fields of HCI and the learning sciences to discuss the challenges associated with the evaluation of emerging educational technologies in the classroom. In alignment with the conference's "designing for the future" theme, the aim of this workshop is to stimulate a discussion with the educational technology research community around the best practices and challenges of evaluation of such emerging educational technologies in the classroom as well as the challenges associated with moving beyond targeting numeracy and literacy to aim for the development of 21^st century skills.

This course will prepare students to both analyze and conduct gesture and multi-modal elicitation studies. These skill sets are critical as emerging technologies continue to shift how we interact with systems. The course will have several sections: Introduction, Objective, and Motivation (30 minutes), Gestures (30 minutes), Gesture Taxonomies (30 minutes), Elicitation Techniques and Current Practices (60 minutes), Hands-on Elicitation Study (45 minutes) which will be done during a break out session, Discuss use-case scenario IDC/Elicitation related (45 minutes). Writing an Elicitation Paper (30 minutes), Challenges and Solutions Discussion (30 minutes), The Future of Elicitation (30 minutes).

The increasing presence of robotics, automated systems, and AI in everyday life is carrying important ethical and social implications for both those who design and develop them as well as for the users. Addressing these complex issues requires active collaboration between multiple stakeholders, including children. Nonetheless, even if emergent technologies are becoming increasingly present in education, most technology-mediated educational projects for children tend to focus on the development of technical skills, leaving little room for critical reflection. This tendency runs the risk of missing opportunities to truly empower children as critical users, (future) responsible designers and skilled stakeholders in the dialogue around ethical concerns on technology. Starting from this perspective, the workshop aims at tracing research lines and opening questions around strategies, methods, tools, and perspectives to support children in developing an ethical and critical sensitivity in the use, design, and development of emergent technologies

This workshop aims to identify and generate critical pathways to more sustainable impact, that maximizes the value of IDC research in children's everyday lives. Whilst the importance of collaboration between research and practice has been well established, and notably embedded into IDC research, the most effective strategies to maximize subsequent sustainable impact are yet to be fully explored and realized. To achieve this, we need a clearer understanding of the audiences that will benefit from IDC research, and how best to reach them beyond current forms of knowledge exchange, infrastructuring, and industry links, to not only ensure sustainability, but also to foster the growth of impact. This workshop will bring together IDC community members together with practitioners and industry to identify and develop ways to sustainably maximize the impact of their work, to make a difference in children's lives, as we look ahead to design for the future.

Data about people are constantly collected and stored to help understand patterns which can then be leveraged by information retrieval systems (IRS), such as search engines or recommender systems, to identify and rank resources that respond to diverse users' needs. As a significant group of technology users, children's data are also collected for IRS. In the 4th edition of our proposed workshop, we seek to continue to build professional community connected to children's IRS and expand on the framework identified in the 3rd KidRec that outlines how to evaluate good IRS. This time, we are particularly interested in exploring how design, research, and practice perspectives can cohesively define policy in this area.

Designing with marginalised children often produces detailed insights about their lives and communities. Whilst it is possible to extract methodological and artefact-centred knowledge from existing design cases, it can be difficult to utilise and build on some of the more complex and multifaceted issues that these generate, for instance, how researcher decisions inform design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite researchers to reflect on the insights design case studies with marginalized children offer to the larger Children-Computer Interaction (CCI) community. Our goals are to reflect on what kinds of insights are generated; what we as design researchers and practitioners would have wanted to know prior to undertaking such work, and; to identify ways of communicating these insights.

Inclusivity is central to Participatory Design (PD) practice, but despite significant efforts in IDC and beyond, it is still hard to achieve during PD, because of a series of barriers (e.g. access to users, language). Such barriers increase especially when it comes to ensuring and supporting the participation of children with varying or complex needs, or when prospective participants are geographically distributed. This workshop aims to create the basis of a distributed PD (DPD) protocol to provide practical advice in overcoming the challenges of ensuring inclusivity for children with varying or complex needs around the world. The protocol will build on the participants' prior experience and on a live PD design session with children and adults, and be guided by discussions around approaches to address a specific design problem while maximising inclusivity across geographical boundaries and research contexts. It is intended to become a springboard for the world's most inclusive Distributed PD project.

Children differ in various aspects such as prior knowledge, learning pace, socio-economic status, interests etc. It has been argued that when we take these differences into account when we develop learning environments, children will benefit from it in terms of learning outcomes, learning experience, and attitudes towards particular subjects. The emergence of digital technologies has accelerated the movement to create personalised learning environments. Although technology-mediated personalised learning is promising, several challenges remain such as how personalised learning should be conceptualized, which methods should be used to establish the effects and how this movement impacts education and especially children and teachers. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners who have done work in this field to facilitate in-depth discussions, resource exchange and networking on technology-mediated personalised learning.

This course will cover child development frameworks from the "classics" that have had a significant impact on interaction design, such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert, to more recent ideas, such as dynamic systems approaches. The materials presented will include concepts such as embodiment, emergence, and plasticity. Hourcade will examine how these frameworks can inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies for children with the goal of promoting healthy development.

Management of type 1 diabetes (T1D) is essential for a successful long-term treatment. This is especially important for teenagers transitioning to self-management. However, due to teenagers' interests and lifestyles, T1D management isn't often highly prioritized by teenagers, possibly leading to deficits in monitoring and health status. In this work, we aim to increase monitoring potential for teenagers by developing a mobile app that is centered around the lifestyle and needs of teenagers. We further emphasize patient-doctor communication by concentrating on the human behind the numbers. We contribute user requirements, a paper-prototype design of the T1D management app and an initial evaluation with medical staff such as diabetes nurses.

The Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN SDGs) are a bid to transform the world by addressing the urgent environmental, economic, social, and political challenges facing our world at large. Education for children on global goals can be achieved if schools are provided with learning resources and technological tools to educate their students through increased engagement and active participation. This work-in-progress article describes a constructionist workshop in a low-income school using the BBC Microbit and hands-on problem-solving activities addressing sustainable development goals. We share our insights on how the children designed meaningful solutions during a Makeathon to tackle problems faced in their communities, that are also globally relevant.

This paper reports on the design and pilot evaluation of a system that uses movement, music and sounds to support playful interactions for children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). OSMoSIS (Observation of Social Motor Synchrony with an Interactive System) is a musical motion-based game. The design was inspired by previous research that suggests that music and movement can be helpful in fostering communication and expression skills, and the first author's experiences as a music therapist. OSMoSIS converts movements into sounds, using a Microsoft Kinect-based system which provides full body tracking. A recently conducted evaluation with a group of 11 children with autism aged 5-- 11 years old showed positive engagement with the system, and some instances of imaginative play. In our discussion, we highlight implications for the design of future music and movement systems to support learning in children with autism.

Collaboration is crucial for developing advanced social and cognitive skills, with synchrony as a key component. Autistic children can find social engagement and collaboration challenging, which can limit their involvement in behaviours that give rise to advanced socio-cognitive skills. Social Motor Synchrony (SMS), the tendency to harmonise one's movements with another has several social benefits and it may be different in autistic children. However, the scenarios studied so far lack universal design, which may have limited autistic participants' displays of SMS. This paper presents an initial investigation into how tablet technology can be adapted to support synchronous collaboration and will identify features that facilitate SMS. We compare pairs of autistic and pairs of neurotypical children to highlight the capabilities of autistic children to synchronise using specially designed technological environments. Synchrony occurred between autistic peers with dual tablets, often paired with shared affect and joint engagement.

This paper reports the impact of exergame augmented physiotherapy along with varied gaming and therapy elements for the habilitation of the children with Cerebral Palsy. The gaming environment creates a platform for children to engage physically with exergames. The lower provided via a Kinect sensor, and game theory maps input to the visual game avatar. We tested the performance of seven children with cerebral palsy while playing exergames and recorded the mixed method data. The overall gaming experience was enjoyable for the children. Six out of seven children initially found it enthusiastic to cope with the challenges of exergames with gradually increasing speed and constant resistance thus improving their involved muscle strength but lost attention when they started to get tired. Our results indicate that children were willing to play the game they liked for increased time-period and time taken to complete each game decreased over the passage of sessions.

The way in which a robot is presented to children can have a profound effect on their perception of its capabilities. A Poppy Humanoid robot was introduced to 43 children (aged 7--9) either as a robot that needed programming or as a member of the team which needed to learn. The children were asked to write down three actions they believed that the robot could complete. Thematic analysis was then used to categorise the data. When the robot was not humanised, 71% of the suggestions were about completing a physical action or sequence of actions and 14% required the robot to exhibit intelligence or learning. When humanised, 39% of the actions were physical and 35% were categorised as intelligent. Introducing the robot as human captured emotional and appearance actions not otherwise present.

Serious games can be a supplement to early intervention and treatment of school refusal. In this work-in-progress, we report on findings from an evaluation session in which teenagers gave detailed feedback on Gnist (English: Spark), a serious game for treatment of school refusal. Our contribution is an empirical review of the teenager' opinions about the proposed game elements to overcome school refusal and their recommendations for future development as well as promoting school refusal on the design agenda.

In literature a lot has been done to investigate the possible advantages of integrating the virtual and physical world, combining the benefits of both and improving the overall user experience. Plenty of tangible user interfaces were designed, to facilitate the development of cognitive skills, motor skills, social skills, or more concrete notions such as STEM concepts for children. Also, thanks to the flexibility provided by digital systems, it is recently growing a sub-research field that specifically addressed people with a cognitive disability. In this scenario, immersive multi-sensory environments are gaining more and more interest as a support tool for learning and therapeutic methods. In this paper, we present Smart Buckets, an interactive interface integrated into "Magika", a multi-sensory system; the result of co-design with therapists specialized in the treatment and education of children with a cognitive disability. The paper illustrates the multi-step co-design process used to produce this idea as a tailored support for their therapeutic activities. Finally, it highlights the importance of adding a new customizable tangible interaction combined within the multi-sensory experience of Magika system.

Over the last few years, researchers, teachers, parents, volunteers, and even IT companies have joined efforts to develop coding activities for children in K-12 education. These efforts include technological tools and programming environments as well as activities descriptions. Kodeløypa is a coding activity offered by NTNU, which focuses on engaging teens in creative programming. In this paper, we report about the design and implementation of an empirical investigation with 13 teachers who attended Kodeløypa as associated school teachers of the pupils from their respective schools. In this study, we have addressed the following research question: What are the teachers' understandings of coding activities for teens outside the schools? The goal of this study was to identify various factors that will help us to acquire knowledge on this important kind of stakeholders, and improve the design and implementation of Kodeløypa and other similar efforts. We have conducted a thematic analysis with the data and we expect the results of this study will help teachers and researchers to design and organize computer science learning activities more efficiently and collaboratively.

Breadboards are a common tool for designing, prototyping, and testing electronics; however, their black-box design and fine-motor-skill requirements make them difficult for children to use. While there are a variety of breadboard alternatives, we see the need for a platform that prepares children to use a traditional breadboard. In this paper, we discuss the design of EdBoard, a platform with a transparent design and magnetic connections that not only teaches circuitry principles but also works as glass-box scaffolding to prepare children to create circuitry with traditional breadboards. We then discuss our comparative study, which evaluates EdBoards and breadboards as learning tools for children. This is assessed through activity-completion time, the fine-motor-skill difficulties, and the confusion about the tools' functionalities.

Social robots have recently been gaining attention in the education field. Given their capabilities, researchers can use social robots in various ways that support human-robot interactions. In this paper, we present an interactive cybersecurity education program to teach children about foundation cybersecurity concepts using a social robot. To create child-robot interactions in cybersecurity education, we devised three processes. First, in collaboration with practicing teachers we developed an interactive story to support student engagement and learning of cybersecurity concepts. Second, we prototyped animations for the story on the social robot. Third, we use a mixed-methods approach to pilot test our cybersecurity education program. Our research highlights the potential of social robot use in education, both for child-robot interaction and K-12 cybersecurity education.

Augmented reality (AR) is a unique hands-on learning tool that can help students in a pervasively misunderstood area of STEM learning, electrical circuitry. AR technology can help with the construction and debugging of circuits, leading to independent learning and reduced assistance. In this paper, we introduce ARbits, a DIY, AR-compatible electrical circuitry toolkit for children. This toolkit exposes children to the concepts of circuitry at an early age, with components that are easy for little hands to handle. We anticipate that instructors at makerspaces can use our designs to fabricate multiple electrical components for children.

Familiarity with the construction, test, and refinement of computational algorithms is of critical importance to many disciplines in the 21st century. We introduce a novel learning environment that lowers the threshold to participation in algorithmic practices including using functions to transform input, using conditionals to selectively transform or manipulate input, creating simple and complex algorithms, and testing and debugging algorithms to iteratively improve them. Our learning environment leverages VR technology and principles of embodied cognition that prioritize "hands in" learning. Instead of creating algorithms through traditional computational programming (which often renders the structure and components of an algorithm opaque), students using our technology build "concrete algorithms" in the form of a virtual Rube Goldberg-type machine that makes the algorithm's structure, components, and functioning visible.

Perspective taking is essential in composing effective interaction and collaboration; therefore, its importance extends to scenarios where one side of the interaction is a robot or an agent. Furthermore, it is a cognitive skill that develops at an early age and consolidates in elementary school years. In this study, we describe the design and implementation procedure of a gamified platform to evaluate children's perspective taking ability while interacting with a robot. The game is designed with different levels of difficulty with educational implications such as practicing mathematics. We share our insights on the design and the usability of such platforms in children's education, while we detail how they can be beneficial to model the robot's cognitive framework.

Children's bedrooms are private spaces for identity exploration and self-expression, defined in literature as "bedroom culture". With the rise of smart-home and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, comes a great opportunity to create a "digital bedroom culture" that captures the rich meaning that bedrooms can have in children's lives. To properly understand how children perceive their bedrooms, and how they think smart-home technologies can be integrated into their rooms, we conducted interviews with 17 children in the context of their bedrooms. Using thematic coding, we mapped children's needs related to their bedroom into Emotional and Practical themes. When discussing "smart-room" technologies, children strongly associated them with practical needs and much less with emotional ones. We argue that smart-home and IoT designers should consider this gap and explore the possibilities of designing IoT technologies that will augment children's emotional needs in the context of their bedroom.

How do children plan their drawing on a touchscreen? Studies have shown that children follow a certain graphic rules and routine in their drawing. We are at the start of investigating how children of different ages plan their drawing strategies on a touchscreen, particularly looking into the graphic routines of 14 basic shapes. 33 children from the age of 5 to 12 years old were recruited to draw a closed and open shapes in our touch drawing tool. We found that children tend to draw circle and square shapes in a clockwise order, spiral and semi-circle shapes in right-to-left direction and wave to zhee shapes in left-to-right direction. We hope to inform designers to build a touch interaction tool for children according to their motor strengths. We wish data quantified accurately can help us contribute to areas such as visual processing information as part of children psychological development growth.

The growing development and commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) allow more children to get access to this technology. VR features a new, more emotional relevant experience with a sense of presence and high interactivity. In this paper, we present VWorld, an immersive VR system designed to boost children's creativity and computational thinking skill. VWorld enables children to create their own virtual world by putting 3D objects on a miniature map, then explore the world and control the chosen objects by constructing program sequences. We present the design and implementation of VWorld system, with the design considerations of children in our VR environment, and conduct the preliminary evaluation and the future plan of the study.

Two in a Pod is a smart toy designed to help children learn how to grow edible plants, getting to know them and sharing their progress with their friends. It is composed of a four-slot wood planter, equipped with soil sensors that interact with a mobile app. Children can plant their seeds, monitor their growth through the app, obtain points for each successfully grown plant and share pictures and their progress, from planting the seed to eating their home-grown vegetables. We designed the toy to help children learn about gardening through gamification and sharing, to increase vegetable consumption and raise awareness about sustainable eating.

A recent UK study commissioned by the National Trust found out that children play outside for an average of just over four hours a week and 10% of respondents have not even been in a natural environment for at least a year [1]. For the kids, the benefits of outdoor games are enormous; they are linked with the development of motor skills and mental and physical strength, enhancing children's creativity, confidence, and social relations.

On the other hand, the problem of sustainability and energy consumption is more and more relevant nowadays. In the future, solar energy could be a valuable alternative to conventional electricity, and thanks to international researchers the technology is still evolving with a focus on fabric and tissue.

The project SuperSolar aims to allow children to play and discover energy consumption through an outdoor play based on kinetic energy and Solar Cell Fabric [2], a tissue able to absorb solar energy. Besides, SuperSolar App informs children about the amount of energy that they produce during the play.

Recognizing children's penchant for interacting with their loved media characters, we design a socially contingent video viewing experience where children are allowed to converse with the main character in a science animation series targeting preschool-aged children. The interaction is enabled by a conversational agent and is designed to prime children to engage in science inquiries with the main character as the story unfolds. A field testing suggests that this design concept is feasible, and children enjoyed the opportunities to become participants, beyond consumers, of the media experiences.

Interaction Design & Children Toolkit is an online tool that aims to present research findings and practical insights from published IDC conference papers into actionable design tips and guidelines. The toolkit translates the research studies into a digestible format that can be easily accessed and used by industry practitioners of children's interactive technologies and applications. The toolkit arranges the translated research under qualities (dimensions) that the research aims to support in children, such as privacy and security, STEM learning, or executive function. Research findings under each dimension are organized in a way that aligns with the design process and project phases.

Recognising the potential positive effects of physical activity in children, and the importance of motivation and engagement in mathematics, the social enterprise Numberfit and researchers from UCL have designed a programme that combines physically active games with mathematics learning. We present the design principles of a platform that enables children (and their parents) to undertake parts of this programme remotely. The platform has been designed taking into account the particular constraints of the 'lockdown' during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we aim to keep children physically active during the lockdown and encourage parental engagement while leaving some space to attend their other duties during these challenging times.

At the junction between social emotional learning (SEL) and neuroscience research, there is a dynamic interplay where electroencephalography (EEG) Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology can allow users to gain an understanding of their mental states. Students are often told to concentrate and pay attention, but they are not actively shown what is internally occurring when they lose focus. We present a curriculum that addresses this issue and that could be important for students' self-awareness. Self-awareness, a subcategory of SEL, can be used as a tool to unpack neuroscience topics for middle schoolers, who often deal with short attention spans. The objective of our design is to help students understand and reflect on how concentration affects brainwaves and how it can strengthen their neural connections. By enabling them to experience and visualize this mental state, middle schoolers can become self-aware of how their cognitive functions change throughout this critical stage of development.

We present Community Garden, an interactive museum exhibit designed to promote connectedness both at the museum and online. To interact with the exhibit, participants draw and share flower petals which are displayed on a communal field, blooming with flowers of other participants. The exhibit's drawing interface is accessed online, allowing for live participation and inclusion of people who cannot physically visit the museum. This paper describes some of the design principles that shaped the development of the exhibit prototype, as well as the technology that allows the exhibit to function, requirements for demonstrating, and future plans to evaluate the exhibit.

In the last decades we have witnessed a steep evolution of computer games. Thus, the content of games and experiences has evolved from 2d to 3d, from basic puzzles to elaborated open-world games, the interaction remained approximately the same. Button and touch-based experiences are the second nature of children nowadays. Virtual reality brought a new way of designing and addressing games, but there was little innovation when it comes to interaction. Machine learning can bring to the table a whole new perspective on the game-play experience available for children [1]. Walking in a virtual environment using face tracking, going left or right using Leap Motion sensor, opening doors with voice commands and shooting using muscle-flexing gesture, all of these combined with educational content can represent a new level on learning by playing.

The original motivation and design process of the AR Perpetual Garden App is discussed in detail. Available on Apple iTunes and Google Play Stores, children and parents, teachers and students, may download and learn with it now, thus amplifying the learning impact of immersive experiences even at home. Inspired by the dioramas of the past, both the creation process and their use in museums as interactive, multimodal, knowledge artifacts are discussed and carefully analyzed. This paper may be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. First, as a way to understand and generalize the critical design factors used and to extend findings into their design research, and second, as an iterative design and development process model, learner-user experience (LUX) design, extensible to other domains.

A foundational skill in mathematics education, spatial reasoning describes the cognitive processes that enable learners to navigate between two- and three-dimensional perspectives. However, traditional approaches to developing spatial reasoning skills contribute to a view of math and creativity as mutually exclusive. Inspired by the tangram puzzle, Buildagram is a 3-D construction set that combines the creativity of free play with the structure of geometry, enabling learners to take two-dimensional shapes and transform them into boundless three-dimensional creations. The set consists of tangram construction pieces, projection cards, and digital tools, which create a learning environment devoted to spatial reasoning. By playing with multiple representations of angles and polygons in Buildagram, kids develop spatial abilities which strongly predict success in STEM fields. From user testing, we see that they also tend to develop positive feelings about math and geometry without sacrificing fun or creativity.

Growbot and Growall comprise an interactive robotic system that helps teach a child to care for a plant. While some children learn caregiving skills from pets, many children live in areas where pet ownership is impractical or not permitted. Plants are more accessible and can teach a similar skillset. But, unlike pets, plants are unable to draw attention themselves to get the care they need. Growbot, a mobile robot capable of moving a plant, enables plants to move in goal-directed ways to gain attention and communicate needs to a child caregiver. As the plant grows with the child's long-term care, the child is rewarded with Growall, an interactive, flowering, wall-mounted surface. As the plant grows, Growall becomes increasingly active to further motivate the child's caregiving. In this demonstration, we will show how Growbot interacts with a plant and communicates its needs to a caregiver.

In this Demo, we present EPESonic [1], a movement-based installation prototype for researching design aspects relating to young children's meaning making through metaphorical action in a multimodal, digital setting. This prototype is the outcome of an embodied design approach that has been developed through co-design workshops with young children aged 2--7, their caretakers and museum professionals. With this prototype and its iterations, we have studied the relationship between pre-determined metaphorical action and fictional framing, digital feedback and playfulness. The goal of our prototype design is to provide methodological insights about embodied learning design for young children that integrate fictional narrative, play and digital feedback to support meaning making with metaphorical actions.

Understanding microbiology concepts is highly relevant for everyday life, with wide implications on health and environment. It is believed that these concepts should be taught at high-school level. Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is a recommended approach for learning scientific concepts, that includes hands-on investigation, performing experiments, and gathering data. IBL is rarely applied in biology learning at schools, mostly due to three aspects: (1) Lack of immediate feedback as microorganisms are invisible; (2) costly equipment; (3) safety regulations. We present "My First Biolab", a novel and accessible system enabling safe and sterile hands-on experimentation with microorganisms, for microbiology concepts through IBL. The system includes a custom-designed nylon bag containing the experiment's biological materials, a magnetic peristaltic pump for circulation, a spectral sensor that monitors bacterial growth, a heat transfer plate for temperature control, and a smartphone UI for setting and monitoring the experiment in real-time.

This paper presents findings from an exploratory study with four children, ages 8 to 13 years, related to children's values in technology. The purpose is twofold: 1) to better understand children's values in a localized context both irrespective of and with respect to an established psychological value framework, and 2) to see how children translate and embed their preferred values into novel technology ideas during an intergenerational co-design session. Preliminary findings indicate that all children identified their families and houses as important to them, ranked Happiness and Equality as top Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) values [24], and created value-sensitive design ideas ranging from a personalizable world in VR to a "Happiness Bot."

This paper reports from the early phase of a Participatory Design (PD) process where the goal is to design and use an immersive virtual reality (VR) application in elementary school for teaching first aid, where pupils are involved as co-designers in the design process. In this paper we report on two conducted co-design sessions in which twelve 13-14-year old pupils participated. The pupils were invited to create interactive storylines that represent recognizable and relevant characters, themes, events, references, scripts, and scenarios. From our viewpoints as facilitators, we describe the conducted co-design workshops and present a set of lessons learnt connected to (1) group selection and group dynamics, (2) methods and artefacts and (3) dissemination and adaptation to VR.

This paper describes the design of a tool to allow children to create their own Augmented Reality (AR) content as part of creative engagement with their local environment. We are exploring AR Maps (physical maps with augmented digital content) as a way of documenting children's experiences of their local area and encouraging their understanding and appreciation of objects and sites in their communities. We have piloted the approach with children in a local primary school, with positive feedback. However, children were not able to create the AR content themselves, and their physical artwork had to be scanned by researchers. In this paper we give an overview of the design context and describe the design and implementation of a tool to allow children to create their own 3D models for the AR environment by digitising their own artwork.

We demonstrate a system to automatically animate hand-drawn characters. Starting with skeleton extraction, meshing and vertex skinning, our system simulates characters using a neural network in a physics-based environment. Using an evolutionary algorithm, it searches for networks that move characters far while keeping a good posture. We validated the system through a user study with 26 participants. For most drawings (60 %), they felt satisfied with the generated animation, and in 76% of cases, they wished to draw and animate additional characters. The participants reported mostly positive emotions after seeing the animations. Only a minority had feelings of strangeness or had negative emotions. This work demonstrates the possibility of creating an automated 2-D character animation system making little assumption on what is drawn. We believe that this work can enable more children to engage in creative play and explore their imagination.

Research in bioethics largely relies on interviews and surveys, which engage participants with scenarios that are distal in time and place to an actual situation. However, context and embodiment are relevant to moral decision-making. Due to the potential to immerse participants in a simulated environment, purpose-built games and scenarios might prove valuable as empirical tools. As a case study of gamifying bioethics, we describe the co-design and implementation of "What Lies Ahead?", a digital role-play scenario for research with adolescents. "What Lies Ahead?" engages young people with ethical issues related to predictive technologies in psychiatry. As preliminary evidence of the validity of this gamified approach, we report qualitative results suggesting that the role-play was immersive, and elicited authentic responses and reflective thinking in adolescent participants. Even though application of game-play mechanics is rare in bioethics, we find digital role-play to be a powerful tool that collects data through real-time, realistic scenarios.

In this paper, we describe and reflect on the process of co-designing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) exhibition aimed to teach children basic AI concepts in the Catavento Science Museum in São Paulo, Brazil. We focus on two of the co-design process with the museum staff: one which sought to design the flow of the experience and get the sense of the target audience; and another which intended to provide content for the AI exhibition. We describe the activities and show how they assisted in the design process and opened possibilities for the design team to develop an exciting experience, tailored to children, promoting informal learning of Artificial Intelligence concepts.

As social media are becoming increasingly popular among young children, it is important to explore this population's needs and requirements from these platforms. As a first step to this, we conducted an exploratory design workshop with children aged between ten and eleven years to find out about their social media needs and requirements. Through an analysis of the paper prototypes solicited from the workshop, here we discuss the social media features that are the most desired by this population.

Drinking a target goal of fluids is a critical self-care activity that children with chronic illnesses should do to maintain their health. Despite the ubiquity of fluid-consumption recommendations in managing health, hydration is an under-researched topic, both in pediatric healthcare and HCI. The goal of the current study is to support children in establishing a sustainable fluid intake routine, such that positive health behaviors and management strategies continue even after recovering from illness. By conducting semi-structured qualitative interviews with pediatric patients, we sought to understand the participants' fluid habits and perceptions of intervention ideas that could promote healthy fluid intake behavior. Our findings highlight an overall lack of motivation to drink fluids and the need for a supportive care tool that tracks fluid intake. Findings will guide the future development of a behavior change intervention to promote a routine practice of achieving daily fluid goals.

This paper describes the exploration of the development of tangible quantitative self-report tools for children to reliably measure the subjective effect of pedagogically framed play. In this work in progress the method and process of designing self-report tools with and for children aged 6 to 9 years is described. Empirical findings are contributed to the field of interaction design and children for measuring the subjective effect of pedagogically framed play from the perspective of the child, by exploring embodied tangible formats.