Adults with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) are often excluded from decision-making processes that shape their lives, reducing opportunities for self-expression and agency. This paper presents a co-design proposal for a public park with adults with ID, focusing on how structured activities support meaningful choices.

Engaging children with nature has long been a focus in the Human-Computer Interaction community. Teenagers, in particular, have a unique attitude towards nature that differs from their childhood years, calling for interactions specifically designed for this age group. This paper presents a tangible artefact for teenagers, which aims to spark curiosity about natural biosignals that cannot be directly perceived through human senses. It encourages reflections on how human biosignals relate to those of non-human beings. The artefact is inspired by an ecocentric perspective of nature and has been tested with groups of teenagers, showing promising results.

Storytelling is a widely explored educational practice. Within Human–Robot Interaction (HRI), robots are extensively employed for storytelling. In parallel, non-robot phygital artefacts — physical objects augmented with digital technologies — have been considered for supporting interaction and collaboration. However, systematic comparisons between these approaches remain limited. This paper presents a systematic review of 135 out of 1,040 studies (2014–2025) involving participants under 18. The review compares robots and non-robot phygital artefacts used in storytelling. Studies were coded across analytic lenses on media, participation, collaboration, learning goals, and Artificial Intelligent support, enabling age-stratified comparison. Findings reveal that non-robot phygital artefacts more consistently foster peer collaboration and creative ownership, while robots primarily contribute social presence and novelty, often structuring participation sequentially. The review highlights implications for future HRI design, suggesting that robots should complement alternative phygital artefacts by promoting openness, adaptability, and collaboration in storytelling

Recent research work on digital-well being considers it a matter of personal growth and education. Research in social digital well-being, in particular, invites young generations to consider the role of digital technologies for social well-being. It explored how to engage young generations in building socio-technical prototypes and reflecting on the impact of technology on people. This article fits into this broad line of research. It reports on a case study with social design students with no computing background. It invited them to consider the use of computing technologies in their social-design projects, and to reflect critically on their work. The design was structured with an ad hoc toolkit with various building materials, including cards for reflecting, and physical-computing devices for rapidly prototyping design ideas. The purpose of the toolkit is, on the one hand, to structure and constrain the generative design process and, on the other hand, to allow a certain degree of expressiveness and freedom to participants. The article reports the results of the case study and concludes with a discussion of how to engage non-computing experts in such a process, balancing freedom and guidance.

A B S T R A C T Micro-electronics tools, coupled with card-based tools, are employed for prototyping smart devices with nonexperts.Lately, researchers have started investigating what tools can actively engage people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in their prototyping.This paper posits itself in this line of work.It presents a toolkit for ID people to rapidly prototype together their own ideas of smart things, for their own shared environment.It analyses and discusses engaging or disengaging features of the toolkit in light of the results of two workshops with eight ID participants.Lessons of broad interest for the design of similar toolkits are drawn from the literature and study findings.

Digital well-being traditionally means limiting the effects on individuals of technology abuses.However, in a broader perspective, it can be crucial to consider the pervasiveness of technology, and the effect it can have not only on individuals but also on their peers in the context of diverse everyday-life situations.Within this view, which emphasises the social side of digital well-being, the paper argues the need of educating young generations to participate in the making of technology for a social goal and have a reflective attitude towards technology and its impact on society.It, therefore, presents a design toolkit as a means to (i) engage young generations to become active in design for social digital well-being and, thanks to the exposure to how technology works, (ii) reflect deeply on the pros and cons of technology in use in their everyday life.By presenting the results of a study with 24 high-school pupils and their teachers, the paper discusses how a phygital toolkit, which structures the design process, engages them in the rapid prototyping of their own smart things, and how it acts as a proxy for soliciting their own reflections around technology and social digital well-being.

Smart things are everywhere: smart watches, smart jewellery, smart art installations. All have in common the capability of sensing with input devices (e.g., buttons), computing, reacting with output devices (e.g., light matrices), and connecting with other smart things. Engaging their end users in their design can be challenging and yet give end users unique empowering opportunities. Toolkits are fundamental for engaging end users and enabling them to design. This paper presents the IoTgo phygital toolkit for smart-thing design with end users who are not experts, e.g., artists and school learners, which results from co-design actions and interventions in the field.

Designing smart things, so as to ideate and program them, is a complex process and an empowerment opportunity. Toolkits can help non-experts engage in their design, that is, in their ideation and programming. This paper presents the IoTgo toolkit, made of card-based material and digital components. Playing with IoTgo can help understand the design context, ideate smart things for it, make them communicate and program them with patterns. In recent years, IoTgo was used and evolved at a distance with few participants. This paper presents a study with it, for the first time in presence, in a high-school. Results are discussed and suggest what role IoTgo or similar toolkits can play in the rapid design of smart things with non-seasoned designers or programmers.

A smart bracelet that reacts to a person's heartbeat. A smart bench that invites passers-by to sit close. These and others are smart things, part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and people's lives. However, people are mainly IoT consumers and rarely given the possibility of becoming IoT creators. This paper presents a case study concerning the design of smart things for outdoor environments, with end users as the main creators. Ideas of smart things were collaboratively conceptualised by child end-users with a card-based board game. Their ideas were taken up in the form of inspiration cards within a bachelor's first-year course, by students coming from different high schools. Students started from children's ideas as inspiration triggers and collaboratively evolved some of them into interactive smart-thing prototypes. The paper concludes by reflecting on its results and drawing lessons for future editions of cross-generational workshops related to IoT design with end users.

Children's role in the design of new technology has been widely investigated. Recently, the research focus has shifted, from the technology they help create, towards what children gain by participating in design workshops. This paper intercepts this line of research. It reports on a design workshop with 27 children, aged from 11 to 14 years old, ideating, programming and prototyping smart objects for their town park. Data were gathered in relation to children's beliefs, before and after the workshop, and in relation to their understanding of design, after the workshop. The analysis of the gathered data suggests that the workshop positively affected children's beliefs and understanding of design, giving indications for future work concerning design as means of empowerment.

Primary school curricula teach children conversation norms for promoting positive social interactions, such as turn-taking and turn reserving, while curricula discourage other aspects of conversations, such as overlapping in turns. However such norms are abstract and difficult to master. Recently, interactive tangible solutions (briefly, tangibles) have been used to sustain the scaffolding of conversation norms. This paper continues this line of investigation. It discusses how meta-design and action research complement each other and tackle trade-offs in designing tangibles for conversations in primary schools. It reports on the emergence and genesis of tangibles for class conversation, named ClassTalk. Then it focusses on usages and actions with ClassTalk in 2018 in primary school classes, and it discusses them in relation to children's and teachers' engagement and usages of tangibles. It concludes by reflecting on the entire experience, and considers trade-offs and lessons learnt for meta-design and action research, as well as for the design of such tangibles per se.

Interactive tangible objects can help orchestrate conversations in school classes. If such tangibles are created with a meta-design approach, for the specific context of their users, they evolve according to their usage. Specifically, tangible object prototypes are created; prototypes are adopted by their users in ecological studies; their usage is reflected over by users and designers to investigate design possibilities, which are rapidly prototyped and again adopted by users. This paper reports on the meta-design and latest evolution of ClassTalk, a tangible for conversations in primary school classes. It shows how new design ideas emerged by making users adopt ClassTalk prototypes, and by moving designers into users' context.

Preference data in the form of ratings or likes for items are widely used in many Recommender Systems. However, previous research has shown that even item comparisons, which generate pairwise preference data, can be used to model user preferences. Moreover, pairwise preferences can be effectively combined with ratings to compute recommendations. In such hybrid approaches, the Recommender System requires to elicit both types of preference data from the user. In this work, we aim at identifying how and when to elicit pairwise preferences, i.e., when this form of user preference data is more meaningful for the user to express and more beneficial for the system. We conducted an online A/B test and compared a rating-only based system variant with another variant that allows the user to enter both types of preferences. Our results demonstrate that pairwise preferences are valuable and useful, especially when the user is focusing on a specific type of items. By incorporating pairwise preferences, the system can generate better recommendations than a state of the art rating-only based solution. Additionally, our results indicate that there seems to be a dependency between the user's personality, the perceived system usability and the satisfaction for the preference elicitation procedure, which varies if only ratings or a combination of ratings and pairwise preferences are elicited.

Smart interactive tangible objects (briefly, tangibles) can help teachers in the scaffolding of algorithmic thinking of 10-13 years old children. In this work, tangibles deal with graph algorithmic thinking. By following an action-research design approach, tangibles were rapidly developed and used in studies with children and teachers (Bonani et al., 2017, 2018). This poster shows their evolution and the most recent experience: a field study with 8 middle school children, and 5 primary school children, using tangibles for graph algorithmic thinking. Data collected by researchers were mixed (qualitative and quantitative), concerning engagement and learning (e.g., Gennari et al., 2017). Results suggest that tangibles engage pupils and help them understand simple and connected graphs. Future work will seek their adaptation to classes (e.g., Di Mascio et al., 2012).

Algorithmic thinking is at the core of computational thinking. Tangible interactive solutions can help children develop algorithmic thinking skills. This paper focusses on exploratory research concerning tangibles for graph algorithmic thinking for primary and middle schools. By following an action-research process, tangibles evolved through prototyping and actions-studies. The paper overviews their evolution and delves into its most recent action: an ecological study with 8 middle school children, and 5 primary school children, using tangibles for graph algorithmic thinking. It ends by reflecting on results and future work.

Social learning curricula teach children social norms for managing conversations, such as the norm of not overlapping in talking turns. Interactive tangible objects (briefly, tangibles) can help teachers in the scaffolding of such norms. Such tangibles should be created for the specific social learning contexts of their users, and evolve according to their requirements. An ideal design process for tangibles for children's conversations is meta-design, based on action-research: evolving tangible prototypes are developed, with natural material and easy-to-use micro-electronics components; tangibles are adopted by their users in ecological studies, and their usage is reflected over with designers to stir design directions or uncover design possibilities, which are developed and again used by users. This paper reports on such an evolutionary design process, concerning tangibles for children's conversations. It shows how new design ideas emerged by making users adopt design solutions and moving designers into ecological settings.

The paper explains how we investigated student perception of Extreme Apprenticeship as applied to an Operating Systems course, via self-report questionnaires. In particular, the paper explains how we analyzed self-efficacy, before and after the course experience.

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the system's main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports on the specification of the user classes for the TERENCE learners by means of user-centred design field studies, the resulting global system architecture, and an example use case of the system, with few related GUI's snapshots.

LODE is a web tool for deaf children, which aims at stimulating global reasoning on written e-stories. This paper reports on an initial prototype application of LODE. First, we motivate the need of an e-tool such as LODE for deaf children, then we report on the assessment of the prototype with expert users and two deaf children, laying the groundwork for the final evaluation and development of LODE.

LODE is a logic-based web tool for Italian deaf children who have problems in the comprehension of narratives in a verbal language; namely, it aims at stimulating global reasoning on written e-stories. Presently, LODE deals with global temporal reasoning; temporal reasoning problems are encoded as constraint satisfaction problems that can be solved by a constraint reasoner. The focus of this paper is the intelligent user interface of LODE; after characterizing the intended end users of LODE, this paper focuses on critical issues faced in the design and assessment of the interface of our e-tool. A preliminary assessment and an evaluation plan of LODE conclude our paper.