Understanding what constitutes children’s well-being in digital environments is fundamental for designing technology that supports children’s development while minimizing emerging risks. This is even more urgent with the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the radical transformations in children’s everyday activities, play, and learning. With this workshop, we aim to co-create an agenda for future actions by mapping the current state-of-the-art research about children’s well-being, identifying policy initiatives and relevant stakeholders that come into play, and reflecting on existing good practices and proposing new ones for digital technology that promotes children’s well-being with a special focus on children from under-represented groups.

Whilst digital education is becoming a reality for schools there is a role for CCI research to move beyond researcher-led school engagements to other types of research that support schools and their staff to lead on the appropriation of digital technologies. One way to advance our understanding of this issue is to examine and consolidate reflections from cases of school technology appropriation. This half-day workshop seeks to capture the enabling practices as well as those that posed barriers within the school. The work will be oriented to further identify necessary changes at different levels: e.g., the organizational level (school), the level of the practitioners (teachers) the level the school community. The mind-set of all the involved actors will also be explored aiming to identify the structures and mechanisms that can support a culture of participation and of collective responsibility by including also students and their families in the process of technology integration and appropriation.

Despite the importance of touch in human–human relations, research in affective tactile practices is in its infancy, lacking in-depth understanding needed to inform the design of remote digital touch communication. This article reports two qualitative studies that explore tactile affective communication in specific social contexts, and the bi-directional creation, sending and interpretation of digital touch messages using a purpose-built research tool, the Tactile Emoticon. The system comprises a pair of remotely connected mitts, which enable users in different locations to communicate through tactile messages, by orchestrating duration and level of three haptic sensations: vibration, pressure and temperature. Qualitative analysis shows the nuanced ways in which 68 participants configured these elements to make meaning from touch messages they sent and received. It points to the affect and emotion of touch, its sensoriality and ambiguity, the significance of context, social norms and expectations of touch participants. Findings suggest key design considerations for digital touch communication, where the emphasis shifts from generating ‘recognizable touches’ to tools that allow people to shape their touches and establish common understanding about their meaning.

The objective of this course, is to introduce participants to location-based games and the challenges relating of designing such games for children. Key characteristics of this game genre are introduced first, followed by a design framework and a set of design guidelines. Examples of location-based games will be presented and typical design patterns as extracted from previous workshops will be discussed. Typical course participants include interaction designers, game designers and developers, practitioners and researchers interested in location-based games and mobile learning.

Haptic devices have the potential to enhance the learning experience by foregrounding embodied, sensory and multi-modal elements of learning topics. In this paper, we report on-going work investigating a game prototype with haptic feedback for seven year old children's engagement with geometrical concepts as part of an iterative design study. Our findings include a new game play mode adopted by the children, that empowers the use of haptic feedback in game play and has the potential to enable the enactment of shape properties in the game play process.

Today's technologies that blur the distinction between users and designers have empowered end-users to engage with powerful learning activities like game modding. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of modding tools as expressive media that support teachers and students alike, to integrate in games their knowledge and ideas without being restricted by tools bound to the way the game is implemented; i.e. mainly through programming and STEM knowledge. We present work in progress on "Sus-X", a GameKit that generates SimCity like games and provides pedagogically designed modding tools. We explore the expressive power of "Sus-X", through two studies with students that engaged in modification of two different games created with "Sus-X": one game involved urban sustainability and the other involved nutrition.

In this paper, we describe two educational games mediated by mobile technology which were designed for use in the context of a traditional historical museum by young children. Our analysis focuses on the principles of the educational design, on the use of mobile technology and on the envisaged interaction between the exhibits and the children. The main argument of the paper is that mobile technology can support the play with the exhibits of a museum -instead of just viewing them in the more traditional way--and in this context the spectrum of children interaction with the exhibits can be broadened and enriched.