Technology-enhanced embodied learning has gained traction in HCI, yet deeper insights into how children’s physical actions interplay with their cognitive and emotional states remain underexplored. This study investigates MOVES-NL, an embodied digital learning environment, as a medium for advancing understanding of the dynamic relationship between movement, engagement, and cognitive processes such as stress and learning. MOVES-NL combines movement and immediate formative feedback to foster arithmetic understanding of integers, offering a novel perspective on the integration between embodied interactions and conceptual development. Moving beyond traditional evaluations of learning impact or media comparisons, this work employs multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) integrating motion capture with physiological data to explore the nuanced dynamics of embodied learning. Through a mixed-methods approach integrating both qualitative and quantitative analyses, this study reveals how students’ physical movements relate to cognitive and emotional states, offering actionable insights to support engagement and learning processes. This research advances the understanding of how children’s physical movements relate to their cognitive processes and highlights key considerations for integrating embodied technologies into curricula to foster student engagement and deepen their conceptual understanding, adding value to ongoing conversations about the role of digital technology in children’s education and development.

Multisensory Environments (MSEs) enable different forms of interactions to enhance children’s learning and play. While traditional MSEs are "built-in" to a specific space (e.g., a room or a part of a room), our movable solution, named MOVES, goes beyond these constraints by overcoming their "hardwired" nature and enabling children to play and learn through five different interaction modalities: feet, hand, card, wand, and voice. MOVES wooden structure (see Figure 1) hold several devices such as a PC, 2 projectors, a depth sensor, a LED strip, a RFID card reader, a tablet and a Wi-Fi access point to enable discrete immersivity, to offer children different ways to interact and teachers to be always in control of the experience. This paper focuses on presenting the MOVES technology, along with details about its rationale, design, and usage.

Allowing children to engage in technologically enabled embodied interaction activities has the potential to enhance learning and play. This work leverages the capabilities provided by multisensory environments (MSEs) to address the underlying research question: What are the benefits, challenges, and trade-offs between the various interaction modalities in the context of educational MSEs for children? To answer this question, we designed and deployed MOVES, a MSE-enabler that goes beyond the previous "hardwired" technologies and affords different interaction modalities. We conducted an in-situ field study with 175 children aged 6–10, who engaged with MOVES and the five interaction modalities. We captured children’s experiences (perceptions and actual use) through action logs, data collected from the various sensors (e.g., physiological data from wristbands, skeletal data from motion sensors), and pictorial-based self-reports. The results provide the differences between the various interaction modalities and design considerations aimed at facilitating children’s learning experiences within an MSE.

Abstract Phygital interaction is a form of tangible interaction where digital and physical contents are combined in such a way that the locus of multimedia information is detached from the physical material(s) manipulated by the user. The use of phygital interaction is supported by several theoretical approaches that emphasize the development of cognitive skills dependent upon embodied interactions with the physical environment. Several studies demonstrate the potential of using phygital technologies for supporting people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the development of cognitive, sensorimotor, social and behavioral skills. Our research aims at exploring the potential of phygital interaction for (young) adults with ID in a real setting, using a research platform called Reflex as a case study. For this purpose, we ran an empirical study involving 17 participants with ID and 8 specialists, and compared Reflex with approaches making use of only digital contents or paper-based materials. Our findings highlighted the potentials of phygital approaches to perform interventions with people with ID, enhancing their performances with an appreciated interaction method. In addition, the post-study interviews with specialists favoured the adoption of phygital technologies in a social care context.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of IMAGINE, a novel interactive immersive smart space for embodied learning. In IMAGINE children use full-body movements and gestures to interact with multimedia educational contents projected on the wall and on the floor, while synchronized light effects enhance immersivity. A controlled study performed at a primary school with 48 children aged 6-8 highlights the educational potential of an immersive embodied solution, also compared to traditional teaching methods, and draws some implications for smart-space technology adoption in educational contexts.

The use of social robots in interventions for persons with Neuro-Developmental Disorder (NDD) has been explored in several studies. This paper describes a plush social robot with an elephant appearance called ELE that acts as conversational companion and has been designed to promote NDD persons engagement persons during interventions. We also present the initial evaluation of ELE and the preliminary results in terms of visual attention improvement in a storytelling context.

This article illustrates ABBOT, a pervasive interactive game for children at the early years of primary school that aims to stimulate exploration of outdoor environments. ABBOT combines a smart tangible object to play outdoors, with a mobile app to access new content related to the discovered natural elements. The tangible object helps children capture images of the elements they find interesting in the physical environment. Through simple interactive games on a tablet, at home children can continue to interact with the collected digital materials and can also access new related content. The article illustrates the design of ABBOT; it also reports on an exploratory study with 160 kids of a preschool and a primary school that helped us assess the attitude of kids towards the game.

The paper describes the design of Ahù, a nomadic smart multisensory solution for children's playful learning. Ahù has a combination of features that make it unique to the current available multisensory technologies for learning: it has a totem shape, supports multimedia stimuli by communicating through voice, lights and multimedia contents projected on two different fields on the floor and allows cooperative and competitive games. The system is nomadic, so it can be moved around, and can be controlled with easy input methods. An exploratory study investigates and provides Ahù's potential to promote engagement, collaboration, socialization and learning in classrooms.

Our research explores the potential of Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (WIVR) as learning tool for children with disability, particularly Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDDs). NDD is characterized by severe and often co-existing deficits in the cognitive, emotional, and motor areas. The paper discusses the learning potential of WIVR and presents the design and preliminary evaluation of Wildcard, a novel WIVR system designed in cooperation with NDD specialists. Virtual environments are displayed on a smartphone placed inside a commercial low cost VR viewer while children interact with the virtual world through gaze focus and direction. An exploratory study performed at a care center sheds a light on the behavior of children with NDDs in wearable immersive virtual reality environments and highlights the learning potential as well as the possible difficulties of using this technology with this target group.

The paper describes the design of a robot companion for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. This work; being informed by general design guidelines reported in the current literature, lessons learned from our own previous experience, meetings with a team of therapists and special educators, and a comparison with 21 well-known robots; shows that the combination of robots' design features and roles would eventually made a robot companion unique and potentially powerful with respect to existing robots for this target group.

"Social stories" are short narratives that describe everyday life situations using paper or video and are widely used in interventions for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD), particularly in the Autistic Spectrum. Our research explores how to transform "traditional" social stories into wearable interactive immersive digital experiences. The paper describes a tool designed with therapists that enables everyone to autonomously develop and customize these "high tech" social stories, and, during a session of use, to control user's interaction and to automatically gather relevant behavioural information.

While there has been a growing body of work in child-robot interaction, we still have very little knowledge regarding young children's speaking and listening dynamics and how a robot companion should decode these behaviors and encode its own in a way children can understand. In developing a backchannel prediction model based on observed nonverbal behaviors of 4-6 year-old children, we investigate the effects of an attentive listening robot on a child's storytelling. We provide an extensive analysis of young children's nonverbal behavior with respect to how they encode and decode listener responses and speaker cues. Through a collected video corpus of peer-to-peer storytelling interactions, we identify attention-related listener behaviors as well as speaker cues that prompt opportunities for listener backchannels. Based on our findings, we developed a backchannel opportunity prediction (BOP) model that detects four main speaker cue events based on prosodic features in a child's speech. This rule-based model is capable of accurately predicting backchanneling opportunities in our corpora. We further evaluate this model in a human-subjects experiment where children told stories to an audience of two robots, each with a different backchanneling strategy. We find that our BOP model produces contingent backchannel responses that conveys an increased perception of an attentive listener, and children prefer telling stories to the BOP model robot.

This paper investigates how a robot that can produce contingent listener response, i.e., backchannel, can deeply engage children as a storyteller. We propose a backchannel opportunity prediction (BOP) model trained from a dataset of children's dyad storytelling and listening activities. Using this dataset, we gain better understanding of what speaker cues children can decode to find backchannel timing, and what type of nonverbal behaviors they produce to indicate engagement status as a listener. Applying our BOP model, we conducted two studies, within- and between-subjects, using our social robot platform, Tega. Behavioral and self-reported analyses from the two studies consistently suggest that children are more engaged with a contingent backchanneling robot listener. Children perceived the contingent robot as more attentive and more interested in their story compared to a non-contingent robot. We find that children significantly gaze more at the contingent robot while storytelling and speak more with higher energy to a contingent robot.

The 1st Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems (KidRec) is taking place in Como, Italy August 27th, 2017 in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2017 conference. The goals of the workshop are threefold: (1) discuss and identify issues related to recommender systems used by children including specific challenges and limitations, (2) discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and (3) build a community to directly work on these important issues.

Our research explores social robots as learning tools for persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). The paper reports an empirical study that investigates engagement as a prerequisite for any learning process of NDD subjects. The study involved 5 persons in this target group and three robots (two research products developed at our lab, and a commercial one), which were used in sequence during individual therapeutic sessions at a care center. The results enable us to compare the engagement effects of different social robots and improves our understanding of the behavior of persons with NDD during robotic experiences.

Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions, and communicates using voice, lights, movements in space, and inside-out projections on its body. The paper describes the design of Puffy and discusses an exploratory study that has involved 79 children aged 4-5 at a local pre-school to investigate the Likeability of the robot and how much children enjoyed, engaged to and remembered some specific design features and play activities.

The paper presents Polipo, a tangible toy created for children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD). Designed in collaboration with therapists, and tested with six children for five weeks, Polipo offers various opportunities for tangible interaction and a range of multisensory stimuli aimed at promoting the development of fine motor skills. One of the most distinguishing attributes of Polipo is its strong customization capability. The system provides a means for therapists to personalize luminous and sound stimuli; it is equipped with a set of add-ons that therapists can easily and quickly adjust on the basic structure to extend the physical affordances of the tool, offering new tactile stimuli and new manipulation experiences. These design solutions, and the promising results of the on-the-ground trials, highlight the potential of Polipo to address the unique learning needs of each single child with NDD.

Our research explores wearable Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) to support new forms of intervention for children with Neuro-Developmental Disorder (NDD). In cooperation with therapists at a local rehabilitation center, we developed and evaluated Wildcard, a system that exploits a low cost VR visor and enables the child to "feel immersed" in 3D worlds, using eye focus and head/body movements to interact with the virtual items. Wildcard includes a set of functionalities for the therapists to monitor children's interaction, to customize the virtual space for the specific needs of each subject, and to automatically collect data.

Our research aims at helping children with intellectual disability (ID) to "learn through play" by interacting with digitally enriched physical toys. Inspired by the practice of Dolphin Therapy (a special form of Pet Therapy) and, specifically, by the activities that ID children perform at Dolphinariums, we have developed a "smart" stuffed dolphin called SAM that engages children in a variety of play tasks. SAM emits different stimuli (sound, vibration, and light) with its body in response to children's manipulation. Its behavior is integrated with lights and multimedia animations or video displayed in the ambient and can be customized by therapists to address the specific needs of each child.

Our research aims at supporting existing therapies for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The personal and social autonomy is the desired end state to be achieved to enable a smooth integration in the real world. We developed and tested a framework for storytelling and learning activities that exploits an immersive virtual reality viewer to interact with target users. Our system uses Google Cardboard platform to enhance existing therapies for IDD and ASD children, enabling caregivers to supervise and personalize single therapeutic sessions. This way curative meetings can be adapted for each child's specific need accordingly to the severity of their disabilities. We co-designed our system with experts from the medical sector, identifying features that allow patients to stay focused on the task to perform. Our approach triggers a learning process for a seamless assimilation of common behavioral skills useful in every day's life. This paper highlights the technologic challenges in healthcare and discusses cutting-edge interaction paradigms. Among those challenges, we try to identify the best solution to support advanced visual interfaces for an interactive storytelling experience. Furthermore, this work reports our preliminary experimental results from a still ongoing evaluation with IDD and ASD children and discusses the benefits and flaws of our approach. On the one hand, we explore children reaction to - and acceptance of - the viewer, on the other hand, therapists' ease of use when interacting with our framework. We conclude this paper with few considerations on our approach.

Our research explores new forms of technology-enhanced intervention for children with Intellectual Disability (ID) that exploits our Magic K-Room, an interactive multisensory smart space designed in cooperation with therapists and special educators at a local rehabilitation center. The Magic K-Room integrates smart objects, smart lights, and (immersive) multimedia contents. It also supports monitoring of brain-signals and automatic ambient adaptation, to dynamically personalize the smart space to the specific needs of each child. These features are enabled by a wearable device that automatically detects and interprets EEG signals.

We propose a new emotional, huggable, mobile, and configurable robot (Teo), which can address some of the still open therapeutic needs in the treatment of Developmental Disability (DD). Teo has been designed in partnership with a team of DD specialists, and it is meant to be used as an efficient and easy-to-use tool for caregivers. Teo is integrated with virtual worlds shown on large displays or projections and with external motion sensing devices to support various forms of full-body interaction and to engage DD persons in a variety of play activities that blend the digital and physical world and can be fully customized by therapists to meet the requirements of each single subject. Exploratory studies have been performed at two rehabilitation centres to investigate the potential of our approach. The positive results of these studies pinpoint that our system endeavors promising opportunities to offer new forms of interventions for DD people.

We report on a nine-month-long observational study with teachers and students with autism in a classroom setting. We explore the impact of motion-based activities on students' behavior. In particular, we examine how the playful gaming activity impacted students' engagement, peer-directed social behaviors, and motor skills. We document the effectiveness of a collaborative game in supporting initiation of social activities between peers, and in eliciting novel body movements that students were not observed to produce outside of game play. We further identify the positive impact of game play on overall classroom engagement. This includes an "audience effect" whereby non-playing peers direct initiations to those playing the game and vice versa, and a positive "spillover" effect of the activity on students' social behavior outside of game play. We identify key considerations for designing and deploying motion-based activities for children with autism in a classroom setting.

The core contribution of this paper lies in exploring new spaces of interaction for children with Intellectual Developmental Disorder (IDD). In the KROG (Kinect-RObot for Gaming) Project, we blend full-body interaction, virtual worlds on large screens, motion sensing technology, and mobile robots to support game-based interventions. This paper highlights the design challenges induced by this mix of technologies and interaction paradigms, presents the prototypes that have been iteratively designed and tested with 22 specialists, and discusses the lessons learned from our project.

Our research explores novel forms of smart spaces that support full body interaction with smart objects instrumented with audio, light, and motion sensors and actuators, virtual worlds on medium-large displays, and smart lights, and are integrated with cloud services for remote supervision and analysis of user behaviour. In this paper, we present the architecture and coordination infrastructure created in the Playful Supervised Smart Space (P3S) project, as well as initial designs for the Smart Object and Smart Space Gateway Components.

Limited studies exist that explore motionbased touchless applications for children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and investigate their design issues and the benefits they can bring to this target group. The paper reports a structured set of design guidelines that distill our experience gained from empirical studies and collaborations with therapeutic centers. These heuristics informed the design of three touchless games that were evaluated in a controlled study involving medium functioning ASD children at a therapeutic center. Our findings confirm the potential of motionbased touchless applications games for technologyenhanced interventions for this target group.

Our research explores the integration of motion-based touchless interaction with human-robots interaction to support game-based learning for children with intellectual disability. The paper discusses the design challenges of this novel approach and presents the design concepts of our initial prototypes.

With the increasingly low cost of motion-sensing technology, touchless interactive interfaces may become a new ingredient in the evolution of content intensive web applications from single-platform (desktop) to multi-platforms use. While the migration from desktop to mobile devices has been widely studied, there is limited understanding on how to include touchless interfaces in this "going multi-channel" evolution. The paper focuses on the design issues that are induced by this process. We propose a model-based design approach that supports information reuse and exploits a systematic mapping from content structures to interaction tasks and touchless gestures. We then describe a case study in the cultural heritage domain to exemplify our method.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become the fastest growing disability in the United States in 2013. The disorder is characterized by a triad of symptoms related to lack of social interaction, deficits in the acquisition and expression of language, and repetitive patterns of behavior often accompanied by sensorimotor impairments. In our research, we explore the use of motion based touchless games for ASD children and develop innovative tools that can be autonomously used by teachers/therapists in school classes or therapeutic activities. The paper describes the design and preliminary evaluation of "Pixel Balance", a motion based touchless game conceived to promote imitative capability, body schema awareness, and social skills in ASD children.