Generative AI (genAI) is increasingly being integrated into children’s everyday lives, not only through screens but also through so-called “screen-free” AI toys. These toys can simulate emotions, personalize responses, and recall prior interactions, creating the illusion of an ongoing social connection. Such capabilities raise important questions about how children understand boundaries, agency, and relationships when interacting with AI toys. To investigate this, we conducted two participatory design sessions with eight children ages 6 - 11 where they engaged with three different AI toys, shifting between play, experimentation, and reflection. Our findings reveal that children approached AI toys with genuine curiosity, profiling them as social beings. However, frequent interaction breakdowns and mismatches between apparent intelligence and toy-like form disrupted expectations around play and led to adversarial play. We conclude with implications and design provocations to navigate children’s encounters with AI toys in more transparent, developmentally appropriate, and responsible ways.

Two of the most socially consequential issues facing today’s children are the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid changes to the earth’s climate. Both issues are complex and contested, and they are linked through the notable environmental costs of AI use. Using a systems thinking framework, we developed an interactive system called Ecoprompt to help children reason about the environmental impact of AI. EcoPrompt combines a prompt-level environmental footprint calculator with a simulation game that challenges players to reason about the impact of AI use on natural resources that the player manages. We evaluated the system through two participatory design sessions with 16 children ages 6–12. Our findings surfaced children’s perspectives on societal and environmental tradeoffs of AI use, as well as their sense of agency and responsibility. Taken together, these findings suggest opportunities for broadening AI literacy to include systems-level reasoning about AI’s environmental impact.

Smart home technologies are often designed to meet the needs of adults, yet children and pets also live with these systems without being meaningfully considered in their design. Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) researchers have shown the value of studying children's experiences and ideation of technologies used in the domestic space. In this pictorial, we explore experiences at the intersection of children, pets, and smart home technologies by analyzing data from an in-home study with 6-to-11-year-olds. Our analysis identifies five themes in how children perceive smart home technologies in the context of pet care: convenience, presence, physical comfort, emotional wellbeing, and responsibility. Grounded in children's everyday routines of playing with and looking after their pets, this work offers design directions for domestic technologies that account for non-human household members.

As generative AI (genAI) rapidly enters classrooms, accompanied by district-level policy rollouts and industry-led teacher trainings, it is important to rethink the canonical “adopt and train” playbook. Decades of educational technology research show that tools promising personalization and access often deepen inequities due to uneven resources, training, and institutional support. Against this backdrop, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 teachers from a large U.S. school district that was an early adopter of genAI. Our findings reveal the motivations driving adoption, the factors underlying resistance, and the boundaries teachers negotiate to align genAI use with their values. We further contribute by unpacking the sociotechnical dynamics—including district policies, professional norms, and relational commitments—that shape how teachers navigate the promises and risks of these tools.

Children are increasingly using generative AI for co-creative activities, such as storytelling. While co-creativity is inherently about collaboration between children and AI, little is known about how children naturally engage, respond, and negotiate collaboration with AI. To address this gap, we conducted a participatory design study with children (ages 8–13) to examine the roles children and AI take and the strategies children use to align AI’s output with their intent. Our findings introduce four novel child–AI collaboration profiles. We found that children were open to technical AI refinements (e.g., adding details to their drawings) as scaffolds for developing drawing skills, but resisted conceptual transformations (e.g., changing objects) that altered their original ideas. We introduce the Child-Centered Co-creative AI (CCAI, “Kai”) framework, grounded in children’s natural collaborative behaviors during co-creation with AI, to inform the design of future child–AI co-creativity interfaces.

Smart home technologies have become common in family homes, making even young children inevitable users of these technologies. However, these systems are typically designed for individual adults, creating family tensions and conflicts over children’s access, safety, and appropriate smart home use. To investigate children’s and parents’ individual and joint smart home needs and dynamics, we conducted an in-home study with nine families (children aged 6-11). We identify four key parent-child tensions with smart home technologies, including struggles over parental protection versus children’s autonomy, differing views on technology’s purpose, disagreements over technology-enforced routines, and children’s vulnerability to embedded commercialism. Our work reconceptualizes parental mediation as a process of “tension management” rather than the application of static rules. This research challenges the dominant individual-centric choice architecture in smart home design, calling for a family-centered approach that acknowledges and adapts to the fluid, complex, and negotiated reality of modern family life.

With the growing prevalence of online mis/disinformation encountered by children, digital media literacy has become an urgent concern. Existing research emphasizes cognitive models, focusing on individual reasoning and specific quantitative criteria to classify people’s information literacy. However, critics argue that focusing solely on cognitive approach neglects the social, emotional, and cultural contexts that shape how mis/disinformation is created and spread. In this study, we expand beyond the cognitive model by examining socioemotional learning (SEL) and sociocultural (SC) perspectives. To explore how children conceptualize mis/disinformation through these lenses, we conducted 26 co-design workshops with children ages 6–11 over a 2.5-year period. Our findings highlight children’s awareness of emotional responses, peer pressure, financial incentives, and the importance of community support. These insights contribute to HCI by foregrounding the need for design approaches that integrate cognitive, SEL, and SC dimensions. We present an integrated framework to inform how community groups can support children and design recommendations that address the growing sophistication of mis/disinformation.

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to youth well-being, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an established approach for building ER skills. Clinicians often use creative mediums such as visuals and narratives to support ER through CBT, yet access and personalization remain limited. Generative AI (GenAI) shows promise for addressing these limitations, but its benefits and risks in youth ER remain underexplored, underscoring the need for expert perspectives. We interviewed 20 ER specialists–psychotherapists, art therapists, and psychiatrists–using a GenAI technological probe that generated CBT-based visuals and narratives. Clinicians highlighted GenAI’s potential as a “bridge” to help youth concretely identify and express emotions, practice personalized coping skills, and mediate ER conversations between home and clinics. They also cautioned that the vividness and unpredictability of GenAI outputs may trigger trauma or reinforce maladaptive thinking. We propose psychologically grounded design implications for GenAI to foster safe, engaging youth ER as a foundation for lifelong well-being.

The advent of Generative AI (GenAI) has raised discussions about its effects on individuals. However, little is known about its impact on children’s creative collaboration, despite its importance for social and cognitive development. We examined GenAI’s role in children’s creative collaboration through five co-design sessions with 28 children (ages 5-11) using diverse GenAI tools (text, image, video, voice); 17 parents participated in focus group interviews. Our findings show that GenAI can foster positive social dynamics by enabling “Human vs. AI” teaming and children’s co-creation with shared ownership. However, GenAI disrupted collaborations when roles between children were unclear, AI ignored group dialogue, and AI dominated children’s agency. Children and parents envisioned socially attuned AI that could play an “older sibling” role–scaffolding while allowing playful disagreement–while raising concerns about children’s overreliance on GenAI. This work advances understanding of GenAI in collaboration and proposes design implications for designing AI systems that support child-centered collaboration.

STEM digital games are an engaging way for children to explore engineering beyond the classroom, but many games do not incorporate children's perspectives or encourage collaborative learning through gaming experiences. Additionally, much of the research on joint media engagement (JME) focuses on parents and children rather than children engaging together. Beginning in fall 2023, KidsTeam UW – an intergenerational participatory design group at University of Washington – and GBH Kids – Boston's public media station and producer of children's media – collaborated on three digital engineering games focusing on peer-to-peer learning and JME. Over 18 months, the team worked with youth co-designers to develop several game concepts. We discuss our process and prototypes, as well as an ongoing technology probe study, focused on in-home family testing. Initial findings suggest that involving children throughout the design process can facilitate the development of games that are accessible, engaging, and encourage peer-to-peer creative problem solving.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024

Peer Reviewed

Platforms like Nextdoor and Citizen can increase users’ fear of crime by broadcasting frequent, local, and personalized information about potential safety risks. These platforms can contribute to a dysfunctional fear of crime, which undermines a person’s quality of life and mental health without actually making them feel safer. In this work, we conducted a mixed-methods study to understand the potential for design to foster a functional fear of crime, which motivates precaution without negatively impacting quality of life. We first interview individuals with a dysfunctional fear of crime and then validate interview results with a survey. Through this process, we identified five strategies for designers to support users in developing a more functional fear of crime. These strategies surface overarching theoretical and design implications for designers and researchers of safety platform with the ultimate goal of supporting safety, quality of life, and mental health for users of these platforms.

The integration of social robots into children’s environments is becoming increasingly pertinent, spanning from entertainment to health care. Although prior studies highlight the role of morphology in shaping children’s perceptions of these machines, there is little research to examine their perceptions of social robots in various contexts. Our research investigates how different morphologies (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic) influence children’s emotional responses. We involved 36 children (9-11 years old) in a design fiction-based study examining how morphology impacts children’s hopes and fears of social robots in varying scenarios and contexts, categorising the results into four distinct themes that represent children’s general perceptions (autonomy, cognition, socio-emotional, and physical). From this, we identify two distinct design challenges, and discuss how these may impact both researchers general users of social robots with children. Further, we emphasise the need for careful and considerate deployment of social robots for children in both research and real-world applications.

The surge in access to and awareness of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) such as ChatGPT has sparked discussion over the necessary technological literacies and competencies needed to effectively engage with these systems. In this context, we explore AI as a tool that mediates cultural understanding and remediates human values – that are often influenced by biases and inequities. Using participatory design for learning with a group of 13 children (ages 8-13), we engaged in five co-design sessions featuring different modalities for socio-cultural approaches to AI literacy. We found that children were more aware of the cultural mediation aspect of AI when the content of the interaction aligned with their cultural background and context. This underscored the significance of aligning the representation of culture in these GenAI systems with people’s socio-cultural ecosystems in modern technological literacies. We conclude with design principles for a more critical and holistic approach to AI literacy.

ABSTRACT

Children struggle to understand hidden data processes (e.g., inferences) and related privacy implications (e.g., profiling). Children use visual cues to reason about technical processes in digital products, sometimes drawing inaccurate conclusions when interface cues are vague or absent. We conducted five consecutive participatory design sessions with children (ages 7–12), probing their perceptions of visual cues and data processes; and iteratively designed and reviewed new visual cues with them. We found that children conceptualized data collection concretely, lacked awareness of its pervasive nature, expressed limited understanding of data inferences, and recognized certain visual cues (e.g., loading, cloud) but unable to explain their meanings. We designed visual cues in “symbolic” and “concrete” styles using icons and metaphors, which helped children understand data flows. Our work contributes to developing comprehensible visual cues for children to support their data and privacy literacy. We discuss design and policy implications of our findings.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has ignited discussions surrounding its potential to enhance creative pursuits. However, distinctions between children’s and adult’s creative needs exist, which is important when considering the possibility of GenAI for children’s creative usage. Building upon work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), fostering children’s computational thinking skills, this study explores interactions between children (aged 7-13) and GenAI tools through methods of participatory design. We seek to answer two questions: (1) How do children in co-design workshops perceive GenAI tools and their usage for creative works? and (2) How do children navigate the creative process while using GenAI tools? How might these interactions support their confidence in their ability to create? Our findings contribute a model that describes the potential contexts underpinning child-GenAI creative interactions and explores implications of this model for theories of creativity, design, and use of GenAI as a constructionist tool for creative self-efficacy.

Participatory Design (PD) is a commonly used method in Western cultures with roots in Scandinavia. After the COVID-19 pandemic, many PD practitioners have transitioned to an online space, where researchers and participants from different geographical locations can co-design together. Yet, we do not fully understand how different cultures collide, mix and blend in the online co-design space. By understanding how one’s culture influences the participation of a child, researchers can better structure sessions to elicit diverse input. This study examines a case study of researchers and participants from South Korea and the United States co-designing together. Close analysis of video recordings, analytic memos, and parent/child interview data demonstrates the ways in which children participated in design sessions. Facilitators paid special attention to various cultural sensitivities. Applying the theory of cultural awareness from public health literature, we offer implications on how scholars who are not fully embedded in the culture where co-design happens can understand other cultural norms and in response, create spaces in which co-design can occur successfully despite different cultural norms. Our findings show how different parts of the ecological systems from ideology, education systems, and ethnicity all influence children’s participation in sessions.

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

Tilt, characterized by heightened frustration, is a prevalent issue in esports, significantly impacting team dynamics and player well-being. Traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) solutions often focus on individual strategies, overlooking the team-based nature of esports. This study introduces 'TILTED', a tabletop game co-designed with youth esports players, aimed at fostering open communication and empathy to collectively manage tilt. Findings from four user testing sessions with collegiate esports teams reveal that team-based interventions like 'TILTED' can enhance team cohesion and provide effective strategies for emotional regulation. The game facilitates understanding and empathy among teammates for managing emotions and maintaining a positive team atmosphere. Our research underscores the importance of resetting strategies and shared mental models in helping to mitigate tilt and offers design implications for future team-based interventions to enhance team dynamics and tilt management strategies as a team.

Online search and brokering (OSB) is the phenomenon in which youth search for information for their immigrant families on the Internet. Few studies exist on reflecting on the past as youth conduct OSB from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood. We conducted a retrospective study using semi-structured interviews of 27 young adults (ages 19 - 24) to examine their experience and perceptions of OSB over time (primary schooling, secondary schooling, undergraduate). We found that although all the interviewees shared a common experience of being an online searcher and information broker for their immigrant families, their stories exist on various dimensions which are constantly shifting and changing over time, as ecological factors influence searching behaviors. We discuss how the results from our study can serve as future references for researchers doing work in search research and designers who are currently working on improving design tools for searching.

Financial literacy is the use of knowledge, skills, and behaviors around managing financial resources. Despite its importance, less is known from a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and child-computer interaction perspective about what financial literacy means for youth, especially the role of digital technologies. We examine children's perspectives of financial literacy and digital technologies through a study of nine participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 – 11) centered around ideating, evaluating, and designing technologies for children's finances. Our co-design findings demonstrate that children's relationship to money can be quite complex in the digital world. Empirically, we report three inductive themes that demonstrate the role that technology plays in children's financial literacy. Theoretically, we argue the need for child-computer interaction research to engage more in financial literacy for children. Finally, we reflect on co-designing for financial literacy, technology, and children.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations.

Children’s online co-design has become prevalent since COVID-19. However, related research focuses on insights gained across several shorter-term projects, rather than longitudinal investigations. To explore longitudinal co-design online, we engaged in participatory design with children (ages 8 - 12) for 20 sessions in two years on a single project: an online collaboration platform with tabletop telepresence robots. We found that (1) the online technology space required children to play a role as technology managers and troubleshooters, (2) the home setting shaped online social dynamics, and (3) providing children the ability to choose their design techniques prevented gridlock from situational uncertainties. We discuss how each finding resulted from interplay between our long-term technology design and online co-design processes. We then present insights about the future of online co-design, a conceptual model for longitudinal co-design online, and describe opportunities for further longitudinal online co-design research to generate new methods, techniques, and theories.

Deceptive design patterns (known as dark patterns) are interface characteristics which modify users’ choice architecture to gain users’ attention, data, and money. Deceptive design patterns have yet to be documented in safety technologies despite evidence that designers of safety technologies make decisions that can powerfully influence user behavior. To address this gap, we conduct a case study of the Citizen app, a commercially available technology which notifies users about local safety incidents. We bound our study to Atlanta and triangulate interview data with an analysis of the user interface. Our results indicate that Citizen heightens users’ anxiety about safety while encouraging the use of profit-generating features which offer security. These findings contribute to an emerging conversation about how deceptive design patterns interact with sociocultural factors to produce deceptive infrastructure. We propose the need to expand an existing taxonomy of harm to include emotional load and social injustice and offer recommendations for designers interested in dismantling the deceptive infrastructure of safety technologies.

Location-based augmented reality games are becoming increasingly popular, which causes a variety of tensions among players as well as between players and non-players. Subsequently, numerous ethical issues and challenges in designing and playing these games emerged. We conducted an online survey and analyzed 2,023 responses to better understand users’ participation in various game actions in location-based augmented reality games, and their perspectives on how ethical the actions are and for what reasons. We provide descriptive statistics showing people’s participation in these actions and analyze users’ expressed reasons as to why they think these actions are ethical or not. We use the theoretical lens of three ethical traditions–consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics–in our analysis, showing the dominance of consequentialism and deontology in people’s ethical judgment related to playing the game, and discuss implications and future consideration for game design.

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ‘create’ scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

Children's fears and hopes regarding technology play a crucial role in influencing its development, impact, and social acceptance. Although studies investigate children's perceptions of social robots, there is a need to better understand how hopes and fears influence children's views of the future. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a study in which we explored 60 children's (aged 8-14) perceptions of social robots using ten fictional scenarios. From data analysis, we elicited four major themes that become the pillars of a model that represent children's perception of social robots (agency, comprehension, socioemotional features, and physicality). The model shows the complex and often paradoxical nature of children's acceptance (hope) and rejection (fear) of social robots in their lives. Our outcome provides the foundations of a new responsible approach in analyzing and designing social robots for children using hopes and fear as a lens.

Children are being presented with augmented reality (AR) in different contexts, such as education and gaming. However, little is known about how children conceptualize AR, especially AR headsets. Prior work has shown that children's interaction behaviors and expectations of technological devices can be quite different from adults’. It is important to understand children's mental models of AR headsets to design more effective experiences for them. To elicit children's perceptions, we conducted four participatory design sessions with ten children on designing content for imaginary AR headsets. We found that children expect AR systems to be highly intelligent and to recognize and virtually transform surroundings to create immersive environments. Also, children are in favor of using these devices for difficult tasks but prefer to work on their own for easy tasks. Our work contributes new understanding on how children comprehend AR headsets and provides recommendations for designing future headsets for children.

Large-scale disparities in computing exist for many youth of color. Learning in informal settings can increase the participation of youth in computing; however, computing education programs have typically been developed by adults for youth. We argue computing education can contribute toward decolonization by directly involving youth from nondominant communities as design partners. When we directly involve youth voices, we can move away from focusing solely on the structural barriers faced by youth of color toward an assets-based approach. We examine a 10-week case study within KidsTeam Libraries, an intergenerational digital design program where local youth conceptualize what digital learning could look like in libraries. Our qualitative dataset includes over 15 hours of video recordings from participatory design sessions, six interviews with participants, 10 researcher jottings, and a corpus of 25 researcher memos written by researchers, librarians, and teens. Throughout our investigation, our knowledge claims are co-constructed with the two teenagers who led the design and implementation of a three-dimensional printing curriculum in their local library with 10 children. Our findings emphasize (1) the ways in which the involvement of teen leaders can foster and sustain community-level relationships for computing education; (2) how we noticed, enforced, and disrupted power within our computing education program; and (3) the systemic challenges we confronted in our process toward disrupting computing education. We provide empirical evidence of teen-led participatory design approaches for computing education in their community through detailed vignettes from sessions and through quotes from key participants. We contribute to the computing education community a novel approach in which youth are positioned as design partners for reimagining a computing education experience in libraries that centers and serves community members.

The video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (AC:NH) launched during the COVID-19 pandemic and families turned to it as a game to play together during isolation. This interview study of 27 families considered how families used AC:NH for Joint Media Engagement (JME), where family members engage with media content together, interacting with each other and bringing additional meaning to the experience. We find that the design of AC:NH well facilitates Takeuchi and Stevens's six conditions for productive JME. Furthermore, we identify and discuss additional conditions that contribute to productive JME: variety and flexibility in play styles that amplify mutual engagement, support for disentrained play that enables new forms of "joint" engagement, and scaffolding for affective interactions. This is followed by an exploration of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected JME. We conclude with design implications for building games to support productive JME for families through design for persistent shared spaces, flexible in-game progress, and social life simulation.

As HCI pedagogy research grows, so too does an emerging set of evidence-based teaching and curricular recommendations. Yet, few studies have implemented and examined these recommendations in the classroom. In this paper, we present a Research Through Design investigation of a studio-based HCI course, which was revised based on HCI education literature. Drawing on reflection surveys, video recordings of student-led user sessions, final project artifacts, and student interviews, we explore how students responded to key educational changes, the strategies that supported and hindered their reflective practices, and how reflection afforded new student insights. Our findings highlight the utility of video-based reflection exercises to support student learning in designing and running user sessions, the importance of multi-faceted reflection prompts, and how students noticed moments of inclusion and exclusion by attending to users’ non-verbal cues. Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the importance of implementing and studying HCI education research recommendations in the classroom.

We perpetuate, reinforce, and have the opportunity to disrupt systemic injustices through the actions we take as individuals. As an IDC community, we have a responsibility to reflect upon our behaviors and the commitments we make to ensure our engagements with youth, especially those that identify as Black or brown, are justice-centered. In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to reflect on what is at stake if the IDC community does not intentionally take a justice-centered approach throughout our methods, our research questions, and our everyday interactions with youth. The goals of our workshop are two-fold: (1) To share stories about the actions we take as researchers with power to influence change in our interactions with youth, and (2) To establish the commitments the IDC community can make for more equitable design and research engagements with youth.

Would you rather go 1000 days without the Internet or five days where anyone can read your mind? We present “Would You Rather” (WYR), a technique for generating formative design insights (inspired by the conversational game of the same name) that combines design provocations with forced-choice scaffolding. Here, we describe the components of a WYR session, which include scenario generation, voting, and group discussion. As children disproportionately benefit from scaffolding during the co-design process, we also report on an evaluation of the technique with 16 children, conducted across seven sessions and spanning the course of one year. We find that WYR fulfills recommendations for focus groups (e.g. eliciting mental models and values, producing focused yet animated discussion) and leverages playfulness, humor, structure, and forced choice to overcome known common challenges of designing with children.

Co-designing with children in an online environment is increasingly important due to external factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the diversification and inclusion of youth participants. Many prior studies about co-design with youth focus on co-located or asynchronous online sessions. However, conducting synchronous online co-design sessions adds layers of complexity and uncertainty to collaboration. This paper introduces a model explicating factors to consider when co-designing with children synchronously in an online space. We examined ten consecutive intergenerational participatory design sessions online where children (ages 7-11) and adults designed new technologies. Along with highlighting unexpected moments and interactions, we use theories of improvisation to guide our understanding of dynamic situations that are out of the control of researchers. This work contributes to improving theoretical understanding of improvisation as a method of inquiry for co-designing with youth, and offers practical suggestions for suitable online co-design techniques and implementation.

Mainstream location-based games (LBGs) highlight three foundations-exercise, exploration, and social interaction-which were hugely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This genre has already had access issues depending on the player's region, identity, ability, and technology, which the pandemic also amplified. Thus, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to re-imagine the design of LBGs to preserve player benefits while challenging these foundations. We conducted a two-week diary study with 11 LBG players coping with difficult life circumstances, followed by remote co-design sessions. Participants continued to play primarily to maintain community connection while adjusting the mode of socialization, finding meaning through virtual exploration, and support mental health and personal growth. Participants discussed ways to enhance the experience by expanding the range of physical activities during social distancing, reimagining proximity-based social interactions, and exploring via social construction of places while expanding beyond how the three foundations are currently supported in LBGs.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning.

Co-design methods have involved older adults in the design process to fill the knowledge gap that younger adult designers might encounter when designing for an aging population. A focus of co-design means establishing equal and equitable relationships between users and designers. To understand the factors that contribute to equal collaborations between older adults and student designers, we conducted 12 co-design sessions with 16 older adults and 11 student designers. We examined their interactions by adapting a framework initially aimed to understand the child-adult design partnership. We also analyzed student designers' reflections to understand their experiences and learnings from designing with older adults. Our findings demonstrate that developing a design partnership is complex. The framework helped surface factors like sharing life experiences and role ownership that influenced balanced or unbalanced interactions. Through the student designers' reflections, we found that student designers identified challenges they encountered and the assumptions they had about the older adult population. We believe that immersing students in a co-design experience with older adults and leveraging reflection activities provides an educational and meaningful experience to the design students.

Smart speakers have become pervasive in family homes, creating the potential for these devices to influence parent-child dynamics and parenting behaviors. We investigate the impact of introducing a smart speaker to 10 families with children, over four weeks. We use pre- and post- deployment interviews with the whole family and in-home audio capture of parent-child interactions with the smart speaker for our analysis. Despite the smart speaker causing occasional conflict in the home, we observed that parents lever-aged the smart speaker to further parenting goals. We found three forms of influence the smart speaker has on family dynamics: 1) fostering communication, 2) disrupting access, and 3) augmenting parenting. All of these influences arise from a communally accessible, stand-alone voice interface which democratizes family access to technology. We discuss design implications in furthering parenting practices and behaviors as the capabilities of the technology continue to improve.

Materials are dynamic-they can be shaped and changed. Often however, our tools and technologies appear to fix materials in place. Disassembly is one practice that provides openings to explore and understand the dynamic nature of material. In this research, we investigate possibilities that emerge from disassembly. Specifically, we studied how novices disassembled a common digital artifact-desktop printers. We worked with 21 young people and family members across two evening workshops at a middle school. We report on the workshop interactions, categories of actions of disassembly, and four in-depth vignettes showcasing disassembly in action. In the discussion, we reflect on disassembly and permission, sustainability, the joy of disassembling, and design considerations in support of disassembly. Our contributions include: (1) extending existing theoretical framings about artifacts and materials; (2) an empirical study documenting the process by which novices disassemble; and (3) preliminary design and policy considerations that enable disassembly.

Users are fundamental to HCI. However, little is known about how HCI education introduces students to working with users, particularly those different from themselves. To better understand design students' engagement, reactions, and reflections with users, we investigate a case study of a graduate-level 10-week prototyping studio course that partnered with a children's co-design team. HCI students participated in two co-design sessions with children to design a STEM learning experience for youth. We conducted participant observations, interviews with 14 students, and analyzed final artifacts. Our findings demonstrate the communication challenges and strategies students experienced, how students observed issues of power dynamics, and students' perceived value in engaging with users. We contribute empirical evidence of how HCI students directly interact with target users, principles for reflective HCI pedagogy, and highlight the need for more intentional investigation into HCI educational practice.

Abstract Libraries play a central role for youth and digital learning. As libraries transition to learning spaces, youth librarians can engage in aspects of democratic design that empowers youth. Participatory design (PD) is a user‐centered design method that can support librarians in the democratic development of digital learning spaces. However, while PD has been used in libraries, we have little knowledge of how youth librarians can act as codesign partners. We need a conceptual model to understand the role of youth librarians in codesign, and how their experiences are integrated into youth design partnerships. To generate this model, we examine a case study of the evolutionary process of a single librarian and the development of a library system's learning activities through PD. Using the idea of equal design partnerships, we analyzed video recordings and stakeholder interviews on how children (ages 7–11) worked together with a librarian to develop new digital learning activities. Our discussion focuses on the development of a participatory librarian design conceptual model that situates librarians as design partners with youth. The article concludes with recommendations for integrating PD methods into libraries to create digital learning spaces and suggestions for moving forward with this design perspective.

We investigate how families repair communication breakdowns with digital home assistants. We recruited 10 diverse families to use an Amazon Echo Dot in their homes for four weeks. All families had at least one child between four and 17 years old. Each family participated in pre- and post- deployment interviews. Their interactions with the Echo Dot (Alexa) were audio recorded throughout the study. We analyzed 59 communication breakdown interactions between family members and Alexa, framing our analysis with concepts from HCI and speech-language pathology. Our findings indicate that family members collaborate using discourse scaffolding (supportive communication guidance) and a variety of speech and language modifications in their attempts to repair communication breakdowns with Alexa. Alexa's responses also influence the repair strategies that families use. Designers can relieve the communication repair burden that primarily rests with families by increasing digital home assistants' abilities to collaborate together with users to repair communication breakdowns.

Raiding is a format in digital gaming that requires groups of people to collaborate and/or compete for a common goal. In 2017, the raiding format was introduced in the location-based mobile game Pokémon GO, which offers a mixed reality experience to friends and strangers coordinating for in-person raids. To understand this technology-mediated social phenomenon, we conducted over a year of participant observations, surveys with 510 players, and interviews with 25 players who raid in Pokémon GO. Using the analytical lens of Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl's theory of small groups as complex systems, we identify global, local, and contextual dynamics in location-based raiding that support and challenge ad-hoc group formation in real life. Based on this empirical and theoretical understanding, we discuss implications to design for transparency, social affordances, and bridging gaps between global and contextual dynamics for increased positive and inclusive community interactions.

In HCI, adult concerns about technologies for children have been studied extensively. However, less is known about what children themselves find concerning in everyday technologies. We examine children's technology-related fears by probing their use of the colloquial term "creepy." To understand children's perceptions of "creepy technologies," we conducted four participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 - 11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children. We found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures). The creepy signals from technology the children described include: deception, lack of control, mimicry, ominous physical appearance, and unpredictability. Children acknowledged trusted adults will mediate the relationship between creepy technology signals and fear responses. Our work contributes a close examination of what children mean when they say a technology is "creepy." By treating these concerns as principal design considerations, developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise.

We present an evaluation of three prototype tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for mealtimes for preschoolers. Building on past work identifying value tensions between adults' and children's perspectives at meals, we evaluated TUIs to address different tensions in this context (for example, the tension between children's interest in experimenting with food versus adults' interest in cleanliness). Thirteen pre-school children and their parents tried out the prototypes, as did an additional seven preschool teachers. Adults and children alike were excited by the prototypes; parents were surprised by children's increased food intake, and children used the prototypes to engage in artistic expression with food traces. However, children's increased consumption was extrinsically motivated by the prototypes rather than intrinsically motivated by hunger. We conclude that TUIs have the potential to enhance shared meals between children and adults but also have the potential to distract or persuade children in inappropriate ways. We present design guidance differentiating these two outcomes, such as incorporating the TUI into pre-existing mealtime objects and routines.

Early childhood is a critical developmental period when children's experiences have lasting impacts on long-term outcomes. Thus, an evidence-based understanding of how technology can support early childhood education (ECE) classrooms promises to be disproportionately useful to children's long-term wellbeing. We conducted an observational study at ten child-care centers, complemented by interviews with teachers and directors. Using a Uses and Gratifications (U&G) perspective, we found that the gratifications teachers seek when they incorporate technology into the classroom cluster into six categories, such as encouraging technology literacy, regulating children's behavior, and supporting child autonomy. Using these themes, we contribute a set of design priorities for supporting this population. We also contribute an expansion of the U&G perspective to include: 1) gratifications resisted, to account for the ways in which teachers resist gratifying uses of technology, and 2) differentiation between direct gratifications and indirect gratifications to better describe technology use in collaborative contexts.

The ubiquitous use of social media by children offers a unique opportunity to view diverse funds of knowledge that may otherwise be overlooked. To leverage this insight, we have coupled the iterative development of our community-focused, Science Everywhere life-relevant science learning program together with an integrated social media app to engage learners aged 6--16 in science with parents, teachers, and mentors throughout their community. We found that learners' scientific funds of knowledge were often not evident in their posts alone; rather, they emerged through our triangulation of posts, interviews with youth and their parents, and observations of their learning experiences in our life-relevant science education program. Our findings suggest that leveraging new social media features to support contextual information, scientific scaffolds and creative expression may make children's implicit and more unconventional scientific funds of knowledge more apparent. Additionally, social media sharing in conjunction with other practices, such as discussing posts with learners and encouraging non-science posts, can uncover the rich contexts of children's social media sharing, which can illuminate their scientific thinking.

A major challenge in education is understanding how to connect learning experiences across settings (e.g., school, afterschool, and home) for youth. In this paper, we introduce and describe the participatory design process we undertook to develop Science Everywhere (SE), which is a sociotechnical system where children share their everyday science learning via social media. Public displays installed throughout the neighborhood invite parents, adults, peers, and community members to interact with children's ideas to better develop connections for learning across settings. Our case study of community interactions with the public displays illuminate how these technologies encouraged behaviors such as the noticing of children's ideas, recognition of people in the neighborhood, and bridging to new learning opportunities for youth.

Research suggests that parental engagement through Joint Media Engagement (JME) is an important factor in children's learning for coding and programming. Unfortunately, parents with limited technology background may have difficulty supporting their children's access to programming. English-language learning (ELL) families from marginalized communities face particular challenges in understanding and supporting programming, as code is primarily authored using English text. We present BlockStudio, a programming tool for empowering ELL families to jointly engage in introductory coding, using an environment embodying two design principles, text-free and visually concrete. We share a case study involving three community centers serving immigrant and refugee populations. Our findings show ELL families can jointly engage in programming without text, via co-creation and flexible roles, and can create a range of artifacts, indicating understanding of aspects of programming within this environment. We conclude with implications for coding together in ELL families and design ideas for text-free programming research.

Prior work has shown that intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) that use modalities such as speech, gesture, and writing pose challenges for children due to their developing cognitive and motor skills. Research has focused on improving recognition and accuracy by accommodating children's specific interaction behaviors. Understanding children's expectations of IUIs is also important to decrease the impact of recognition errors that occur. To understand children's conceptual model of IUIs, we completed four consecutive participatory design sessions on designing IUIs with an emphasis on error detection and correction. We found that, while children think of interactive systems in terms of both user input and behavior and system output and behavior, they also propose ideas that require advanced system intelligence, e.g., context and conversation. Our work contributes new understanding of how children conceptualize IUIs and new methods for error detection and correction, and will inform the design of future IUIs for children to improve their experience.

Influencing adolescent interest in computing is key to engaging diverse teens in computer science learning. Prior work suggests that informal mentorship may be a powerful way to trigger and maintain interest in computing, but we still know little about how mentoring relationships form, how mentors trigger and maintain interest, or what qualities adolescents value in informal mentors. In a 3-week career exploration class with 18 teens from underrepresented groups, we had students write extensively about their informal computing mentors. In analyzing their writing, we found that most teens had informal computing mentors, that mentors were typically teachers, friends, and older siblings (and not parents or school counselors), and that what teens desired most were informal mentors that were patient, helpful, inspiring, and knowledgeable. These findings suggest that computing mentors can come in many forms, that they must be patient, helpful, and inspiring, but that they also require content knowledge about computing to be meaningful. Future work might explore what knowledge of computing is sufficient to empower teachers, parents, peers, and family to be effective computing mentors.

Approximately 8 million U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent. Lower-socioeconomic (SES) immigrant parents often rely on their children's language skills to problem-solve family needs-a practice known as brokering. Yet it is unknown how children use their language and digital literacy skills to search and broker information online. This paper examines how children with lower-SES immigrant parents search and broker information online. We focused on Latino families as they are the fastest growing U.S. minority group. We conducted in-home interviews and observations of search tasks with 23 parent-child dyads. We demonstrate: (1) how Online Search and Brokering (OSB) is impacted by familial values and resources at an individual, family, community, and digital infrastructure level, and (2) through search vignettes, how parent-child dyads problem-solve family needs through OSB. Our work demonstrates a different purpose of technology use in families: intergenerational, bilingual, and online co-searching to problem-solve family needs.

In this one-day workshop, we aim to bring together a community of researchers at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference who will share how they already make or plan to make equity-promoting fairness by allocating more resources and opportunities to those who need it? and inclusivity? the inclusion and meaningful participation of people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized? foundational to their research with children and families. By discussing theoretical and practice-based approaches, providing feedback on each other's research, and collectively identifying concerns and challenges in addressing equity and inclusivity when doing and assessing research in IDC, we intend to do twofold. First, we will build our understanding of how our approaches, designs, and/or methods may either be restricting or facilitating equitable access and participation of diverse children and their families. Second, we will work to establish and articulate approaches to our research that forefront equity and inclusivity, taking into account how intersecting identities affect how the children and families with whom we work have or do not have access to various sources of power.

Wearable sensing poses new opportunities to enhance personal connections to learning and authentic scientific inquiry experiences. In our work, we leverage the body and physical action as an engaging platform for learning through live physiological sensing and visualization (LPSV). Prior research suggests the potential of this approach, but was limited to single-session evaluations in informal environments. In this paper, we examine LPSV tools in a classroom environment during a four-day deployment. To highlight the complex interconnections between space, teachers, curriculum, and tool use, we analyze our data through the lens of Activity Theory. Our findings show the importance of integrating model-based representations for supporting exploration and analytic representations for scaffolding scientific inquiry. Activity Theory highlights leveraging life-relevant connections available within a physical space and considering policies and norms related to learners' physical bodies.

Though prior work shows parents worry about screen media experiences displacing physical activity and time outdoors, this research does not account for location-based mobile games like Pokémon GO, which specifically facilitate outdoor activity. To fill this gap in the research, we surveyed and interviewed parents to understand (1) their values and perceptions of this type of gameplay and (2) how they co-play Pokémon GO with their children. Our findings provide empirical evidence that, in addition to appreciating the increased exercise and time outdoors, parents valued how play led to family bonding experiences. Furthermore, some traditional concerns about screen time persisted in this context, and new concerns about safety in real-world environments emerged. Parents mitigated these concerns with rules and gameplay choices, such as maintaining control of the mobile device, to ensure children were safe. This work contributes an empirical understanding of families as co-users of technology and offers a generative lens to study and design for joint media engagement among family members where gameplay differs from normative notions of screen time.

Prior studies have focused on child interactions in participatory design (PD) with adults and children, but less is known about what specific adult-child interactions constitute a partnership. In this study, we unpack what constitutes an "equal partnership" in PD between adults and children. On the basis of prior literature, we created a new framework that examines the complementary roles between children and adults. Next, we analyzed a case study of a year-long intergenerational design team of children (ages 7-11) and adults. From this analysis, we determined that design partnerships are composed of four dimensions that span from unbalanced to balanced interactions: facilitation, relationship building, design-by-doing, and elaborating together. Finally, to demonstrate its utility, we analyzed two focal co-design sessions using our framework. Our analysis suggests that equal partnership in PD is not a single static interaction but a development over time of design interactions influenced by context, experience, and participants.

In families composed of parents and children, the health of parents and children is often interrelated: the health of children can have an impact on the health of parents, and vice versa. However, the design of health tracking technologies typically focuses on individual self-tracking and self-management, not yet addressing family health in a unified way. To examine opportunities for family-centered health informatics, we interviewed 14 typically healthy families, interviewed 10 families with a child with a chronic condition, and conducted three participatory design sessions with children aged 7 to 11. Although we identified similarities between family-centered tracking and personal self-tracking, we also found families want to: (1) identify ripple effects between family members; (2) consider both caregivers and children as trackers to support distributing the burdens of tracking across family members; and (3) identify and pursue health guidelines that consider the state of their family (e.g., specific health guidelines for families that include a child with a chronic condition). We contribute to expanding the design lens from self-tracking to family-centered health tracking.

Prior research has established that long-term interests in programming are often shaped by formative computing experiences, especially those involving programming and graphics. Existing authoring environments for children (ages 9-14) to make 2D games and animations require them to: (a) create programs, (b) customize templates, or (c) combine rewrite rules with programs. One way to support early experiences in computing for a more diverse set of learners is to simplify such authoring systems, by removing text heavy code and minimizing cognitive load, which can allow separation of coding concepts from writing code. In this paper, we describe an exploratory system we are designing to test this idea, called BlockStudio. Using a Programming By Example paradigm, children manipulate colored blocks on the screen to specify desired behavior via concrete changes. Based on these inputs, our system synthesizes generalized rules based on color. We give a brief overview of our current prototype, then share insights gleaned from two intergenerational co-design sessions with children and discuss implications for designers of similar systems.

Partnering with parents and children in the design process can be important for producing technologies that take into consideration the rich context of family life. However, to date, few studies have examined the actual process of designing with families and their children. Without understanding the process, we risk making poor design choices in user-interactive experiences that take into account important family dynamics. The purpose of this investigation is to understand how parent-child relationships in families shape co-design processes and how they are reshaped through co-design. We document the evolutionary process and outcomes that exist in co-design partnerships between researchers and families. We found that parents' engagement patterns shifted more slowly than that of children's from observing and facilitating to design partnering practices. Our analysis suggests the importance of establishing and nurturing social bonds among parents, children, and researchers in the co-design process.

Many new technologies for children focus on fostering learning. However, designers and researchers often come from disparate traditions that either stress innovative design methodologies (e.g. participatory design) or rigorous examination of learning (e.g., design-based research). This workshop brings together researchers who are actively engaged in, or interested in, weaving together these research fields to develop usable, engaging, and innovative technologies that are also deeply grounded in theories of learning. We invite participants to submit position papers describing their work in progress. The goals of the workshop will be to better articulate the unique issues that arise at the intersection of interaction design and learning design, and develop an agenda for a next wave of research that draws a clear link between methodologies in these fields. All topic areas related to design, learning, and children are welcome.

In this paper, we present the design evolution of two social media (SM) tools: Scientific INQuiry (SINQ), which transformed into ScienceKit. We detail our motivations for using SM tools in science learning and the design decisions we made over a 2year, designbased research project. Our designs grew from our experiences using SM tools in the field and codesigning these systems with children. Our longitudinal case study and design narrative contribute to our understanding of the design and use of SM tools to support children's scientific inquiry. Specifically, we detail (1) the affordances and constraints we gleaned from the design evolution of SINQ to ScienceKit, (2) the potential of SM to guide learning behaviors, and (3) the role of SM for children and the community of adults and peers who support them.

Children are increasingly using social media tools in their lives. In addition, there is great interest in understanding how to design and evaluate social technologies to aid in children's learning and development. We describe two research endeavors that begin to address these issues. First, we introduce SINQ, a social media application that encourages children to practice Scientific INQuiry skills through collaborative participation. Second, we conducted a case study of SINQ with six children, ages 8-11, and collected log data of their interactions in the app. We applied learning analytics on this log data using a visual analytic tool called LifeFlow. The event-sequence visualizations showed how children engaged with scientific inquiry within the SINQ app, and most importantly illuminated how inquiry is not a linear process with a defined start and end. The children in our study traversed the inquiry process via diverse pathways, all of which were supported by the SINQ app.

In this paper, we describe a mobile, social media app called SINQ that was the product of a 15-month co-design process with a child design team. The goal of SINQ is to utilize social media design features in ways that help children conceptualize Scientific INQuiry practices through intuitive sharing of media and ideas from their everyday lives. We describe how SINQ builds from prior work in software for science learning and mobile technology for children. We also highlight how SINQ is a distinct evolution of technology for scientific inquiry learning. We argue that by taking seriously, the affordances of social media applications, new opportunities and design challenges arise for interaction design for learning technologies.

Researchers often utilize the method of Participatory Design to work together with users to enhance technology. In particular, Cooperative Inquiry is a method of Participatory Design with children that involves full partnership between researchers and children. One important challenge designers face in creating learning technologies is that these technologies are often situated in specific activities and contexts. While children involved in these activities may have subject expertise (e.g., science inquiry process), they may not have design expertise (e.g., design aesthetics, usability). In contrast, children with design expertise may be familiar with how to design with researchers, but may not have subject expertise. Little is known about the distinction between child design and subject experts in Cooperative Inquiry. In this paper, we examine two cases -- involving children with design expertise and those with subject expertise -- to better understand the design process for both groups of children. The data from this study suggests that similarities do exist between the two cases, but that design and subject knowledge does play a significant role in how children co-design learning technologies.

Cooperative Inquiry is a Participatory Design method that involves children (typically 7--11 years old) as full partners with adults in the design of technologies intended for use by children. For many years, child designers have worked together with adults in Cooperative Inquiry approaches. However, in the past children have not typically initiated the design problems tackled by the intergenerational team, nor have they acted in leadership roles by conducting design sessions-- until now. In this paper, we detail three case studies of Cooperative Inquiry in which children led the process of design, from initial problem formulation through one iteration of design review and elaboration. We frame our analysis from three perspectives on the design process: behaviors exhibited by child leaders and their fellow co-designers; supports required for child leaders; and views expressed by child leaders and their co-design cohort about the sessions that they led.

In this paper, we present a framework that describes commonly used design techniques for Participatory Design with children. Although there are many currently used techniques for designing with children, researchers working in differing contexts and in a changing technological landscape find themselves facing difficult design situations. The FACIT PD framework presented in this paper can aid in choosing existing design techniques or in developing new techniques regardless of the stage in the design cycle, the technology being developed, or philosophical approach to design method. The framework consists of eight dimensions, concerning the design partners, the design goal, and the design technique. The partner dimensions are partner experience and need for accommodation. The design goal dimensions are design space and maturity of design. The technique dimensions include: cost, portability, technology and physical interaction. Three cases will be presented which describe new techniques developed using the framework and two cases will describe existing techniques.

In this article, we present an in‐home observation and in‐context research study investigating how 38 adolescents aged 14–17 search on the Internet. We present the search trends adolescents display and develop a framework of search roles that these trends help define. We compare these trends and roles to similar trends and roles found in prior work with children ages 7, 9, and 11. We use these comparisons to make recommendations to adult stakeholders such as researchers, designers, and information literacy educators about the best ways to design search tools for children and adolescents, as well as how to use the framework of searching roles to find better methods of educating youth searchers. Major findings include the seven roles of adolescent searchers, and evidence that adolescents are social in their computer use, have a greater knowledge of sources than younger children, and that adolescents are less frustrated by searching tasks than younger children.

Children often report that school science is boring and abstract. For this reason, we have developed Life-relevant Learning (LRL) environments to help learners understand the relevance that scientific thinking, processes, and experimentation can have in their everyday lives. In this paper, we detail findings that aim to increase our understanding of the ways in which technology can support learners' scientific practice and their personal meaning in LRL through the integration of two mobile apps into an LRL environment. Our analysis of the artifacts created in these systems show that technology must strike a balance between structured scaffolds and flexible personal design to support learners' scientifically meaningful experiences. Our data suggests that integration of media forms and mobile technology can provide creative ways for learners to express their scientific thinking, make artifacts of their personally meaningful experiences, and individualize artifacts in scientifically meaningful ways.

Face-to-face design with child and adult design partners is not always possible due to distant geographical locations or time differences. Yet we believe that the designs of children in areas not co-located with system builders, or who live in locations not easily accessed, are just as important and valid as children who are easily accessible especially when designing for a multinational audience. This paper reports on the prototype design process of DisCo, a computer-based design tool that enables intergenerational co-designers to collaborate online and asynchronously while being geographically distributed. DisCo contains tools that enable the designers to iterate, annotate, and communicate from within the tool. This tool was used to facilitate distributed co-design. We learned that children were less forgiving of their inability to draw on the computer than on paper, and they formed small, intergenerational design teams at their own locations when the technology did not work as they expected.