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.

Embodied, co-design and children-specific methods have been gaining traction in Interaction Design for Children, and their potential and benefits are well-established. Yet methods at the intersection of all three areas are scarcer. In addition, design researchers lack tools for the analysis and adaptation of existing methods, and the creation of new ones to suit the particularities of the design project at hand. Here, we present the Think-4-EmCoDe framework for the design and analysis of embodied co-design methods and techniques for children, which foregrounds key qualities in embodied interaction design research: (1) embodied awareness; (2) reflective imaginary; (3) emergence; (4) embodied memory; (5) situated relationality; (6) contingency; (7) playful engagement; (8) play practice; (9) developmental scaffolds; and (10) social dialogue. The framework has been developed drawing from several theories, methods, and frameworks in the areas of co-design and embodied design approaches. This framework allows designers to focus on both general design qualities for embodied experiences and the specific child perspective. We illustrate the use of the framework through the analysis of three design techniques and discuss its potential as an inspirational tool to understand, adapt and refine embodied co-design techniques for children.

In this half-day workshop, we will explore how to co-design technology in inclusive classrooms where children have diverse sensory, motor, cognitive or behavioral abilities. We will discuss barriers and opportunities in co-designing for inclusion, exploring techniques and tools to support learning in a collaborative environment. We encourage researchers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to participate and provide their expertise and know-how in improving these environments, with an aim to support both inclusion and collaboration; and children’s exploration of their own interests and approaches to learning. We seek to better understand research experiences in these environments, co-design techniques that were successfully used, and what they can teach the broader field of interaction design for children.

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.

The article describes an ideographic study conducted with 10 to 11 years old students to investigate their perceptions, ideas and imaginaries about robots. Its objective is to use this understanding to expand the ways of thinking the pedagogy of educational robotics. The study employed an art-based research approach and focused on involving students in the process of producing a fictional audiovisual narrative about robots. We analyzed their creative process and the resulting video through a multimodal approach. This analysis allowed identifying the different imaginaries, discourses and ideas that the participants have around the concept of "robot". These axes are used as cornerstones to begin a reflexive process to problematize and enable new perspectives to the pedagogy of educational robotics.

Augmented and Mixed Reality mobile technologies are becoming an emerging trend in the development of play and learning experiences for children. This tendency requires a deeper understanding of their specificities to adequately inform design. To this end, we ran a study with 36 elementary school children to compare two AR/MR interaction paradigms for mobile technologies: (1) the consolidated "Window-on-the-World" (WoW), and (2) the emerging "World-as-Support" (WaS). By analyzing children's understanding and use of space while playing an AR/MR mystery game, and analyzing the collaboration that emerges among them, we show that the two paradigms scaffold children's attention differently during the experience and elicit different forms of collaboration. We conclude by presenting a conceptual framework to distinguish the strengths, weaknesses, and potential of the two AR/MR paradigms, as well as the comparison between marker-based and marker-less technical solutions. This study aims at helping practitioners in taking design decisions for AR/MR technologies for children.

Current technical capabilities of mobile technologies are consolidating the interest in developing context-aware Augmented/Mixed Reality applications. Most of these applications are designed based on the Window-on-the-World (WoW) interaction paradigm. A significant decrease in cost of projection technology and advances in pico-sized projectors have spurred applications of Projective Augmented Reality. This research has focused mainly on technological development. However, there is still a need to fully understand its communicational and expressive potential. Hence, we define a conceptual paradigm that we call World-as-Support (WaS). We compare the WaS and WoW paradigms by contrasting their assumptions and cultural values, as well as through a study of an application aimed at supporting the collaborative improvisation of site-specific narratives by children. Our analysis of children's understanding of the physical and social environment and of their imaginative play allowed us to identify the affordances, strengths and weaknesses of these two paradigms.

Participatory Design (PD) has become a standard methodology in HCI, however, the evaluation of the outcomes of participatory processes is often exclusively driven by researcher defined measures of success. Through our work with autistic children, who have radically different life worlds from our own, it became evident that their criteria for the success of a project are most likely also very different. In order to address the limitations of researcher defined and led evaluations in this context, we developed an approach for participatory evaluation called PEACE (Participatory Evaluation with Autistic ChildrEn). Using this approach, we were able to include autistic children in dedicated evaluation phases through the co-definition of goals and methods, joint processes of data gathering and the co-interpretation of results. We discuss three case studies in which we successfully applied our approach and conclude with a reflection on the novel insights created through participatory evaluation and researchers' roles in such a process.

Participatory Design (PD) methods have become a widespread practice in the development of digital technologies. Even if PD is grounded on a critical and reflective tradition, often the presence of implicit assumptions may have relevant methodological and ethical consequences, since they may unintentionally shape our way of considering or behaving with participants. To tackle this issue, we suggest that the assumptions and expectations of designers must be carefully examined. To guide this process, we propose using a self-reflexive critical practice based on autoethnography as a tool to reflect and construct knowledge out of our subjective experience of designers involved in PD. Grounded on our experience of PD with teenagers, we report how autoethnography allowed gaining a deeper understanding of one's own positions, assumptions and contradictions on aspects related to our standpoint on participatory practices, the images that we have of participants and our role in the design process. This awareness allowed taking into account emotions, personal stories and values in ethical choices, hence guiding situated decision-making on ethical and methodological aspects. Furthermore, we suggest that this approach not only contributes to unveil incongruences and strengthens the validity of the research, but also facilitates conditions for enabling a suitable space for creation and support novel forms of reporting PD experiences.

We present a qualitative, idiographic study aimed at exploring how children create bridges between embodied experience and meaning construction while interacting with a Full-Body Interaction Learning Environment. Starting from the analysis of four case studies, we illustrate different possible paths through which children can transform embodied experience into an 'object--to-think-with' and delineate the different resources for meaning making that they employed. These outcomes contribute to expand the current understanding around embodied learning with interactive technologies, as well as suggest a set of qualities to think about interaction design and future research.

Despite the increasing interest in embodied interaction for learning, research has not yet provided strong proof of its advantages with respect to other types of interaction, or with respect to other types of pedagogical approaches. In this paper we present two studies aimed at comparing how a collaborative interactive experience based on two different interaction paradigms -one based on Full-Body Interaction and the other on Desktop computer interaction- may impact the socio-affective aspects of collaboration as part of a learning process in children. Our results show that Full-Body Interaction had a highly significant impact on how the participating children perceived collaboration in small groups and on how they felt about the other children in the group. This indicates that Full-Body Interaction may be beneficial for supporting the construction of a positive social space for collaborative learning, given its potential to enable the use of embodied resources, which are fundamental for social communication and social cognition.

The aim of this paper is to explore techniques to design specific gestures with children to improve the interaction design of a Full-Body Interaction Learning Environment. This exploratory case study is part of the EcoSystem Project, a learning environment aimed at supporting children's understanding of environmental issues related to air-pollution. In order to involve children in the design of the physical interaction with the system, we used two different techniques to facilitate the design of gestures: "sketching through the body" and "sketching with puppets". The results indicate that children adopted different strategies to design gestures for each technique. Within them, the most effective approach was related to the switch between performing gestures with their own bodies and simulating those gestures with puppets. This finding indicates the potential of those Participatory Design methods which combine multi-modal resources as instruments to allow children to reflect upon their own knowledge and express it more precisely.

The paper presents an exploratory study aimed toward including children in the design of an Interactive Learning Environment based on Full-Body Interaction. The study proposes a method based on using Participatory Design techniques to analyze core meanings and misconceptions of children. The aim is to identify appropriate learning goals and to define concepts capable of bridging between children's knowledge and novel contents. Furthermore, it explores a novel approach aimed at fostering design methods suitable for a Full-Body Interaction experience. The results show the benefits of the method in defining guidelines for a first design proposal of a Learning Environment based on environmental education.

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness about the importance of involving children with special needs in the process of designing technology. Starting from this perspective, the paper presents the participatory design process carried out with children with autistic spectrum disorder for the design of a Kinect motionbased game aimed at fostering social initiation skills. By describing the strategies used for the design of the activities, we will suggest possible approaches aimed toward widening the space for contributions of children and including them at a more creative level. Within that, major emphasis will be dedicated to discussing the "empowering dimension" of participatory design activities as an instrument to enhance benefits both for design results and for the children themselves. Finally, the balance between structure and freedom in the design of the activities will be discussed.

There is a growing interest in learning studies about the use of interaction models that involve sensorimotor activities and affordances within an educational experience. This paper explores how concrete experiences, in this case an educational application designed for an Interactive Slide, can make concepts of buoyancy and Archimedes' principle understandable to children. We hypothesized that the relationship between kinesthetic experience and the Interactive Slide's affordances would improve learning. To test this hypothesis we have defined two principal experimental conditions, using the same application on the Interactive Slide and on a desktop computer, and compared the results from a sample of 331 children through pre and post-tests. Our results show modest but noticeable improvements in test scores from children assigned to the Interactive Slide condition. The results of this study highlight the opportunities of the Interactive Slide as a learning environment to foster the processes of building abstract concepts. However, additional exploration is necessary to improve the design strategies for new applications and refine the assessment methodology.