This paper advances a collective research manifesto for Computational Empowerment (CE) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), grounded in diverse practices across global contexts. Drawing on five cases from Asia, Europe, and North America, we examine how CE commitments materialize in real world settings, revealing both their transformative potential and the tensions they introduce. Our cases illustrate that CE is inherently context dependent, socially situated, and shaped by surrounding structures. We identify key directions for extending CE: embedding critical and ethical perspectives, foregrounding situatedness and relationality, challenging convenient choices, and questioning design assumptions. This involves strengthening children’s agency in shaping computational systems and widening CE’s reach through more inclusive, sustainable practices. We offer this work as intentionally incomplete—an invitation to ongoing dialogue and collective action toward empowering children in computing.

Gender disparities persist in computing education and disproportionately affect girls and young women from marginalized communities. Addressing these inequities requires reconsidering not only the content of education, but also the ways it is taught and the perspectives that are given priority. This paper introduces a novel interdisciplinary framework that bridges theatre education, feminist pedagogy, and computing education to inform critical, creative, and socially responsive approaches to non-formal and formal learning contexts. Drawing on a narrative review across these domains, we identify 12 educational principles that foreground equity and cultural relevance in computing education. We illustrate the framework through a case study within the #ACTFEM program aimed at motivating young women from marginalized communities to participate in computing activities. For the IDC community, this work advances discussions on feminist HCI, theatre-inspired practices, and computational empowerment, positioning it as a space where social innovation, such as inclusion, community impact, and transformative change play a crucial role in advancing the field.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

We suggest transformative agency is brought to the forefront of Participatory Design (PD) in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research to scaffold children's active engagement in matters related to digital technology and its effects on society. Based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we define children's transformative agency as their ability to actively change their own matters, their shared matters, or even societal matters for the better and more just society. We report on a framework for analyzing PD research with children and demonstrate how PD can support transformative agency of children through vignettes from two PD projects with children. Based on the vignettes, we provide a set of additional PD aims to consider when integrating the scaffolding of transformative agency explicitly in PD with children. A focus on children's transformative agency will contribute significantly to the maturing field of Computational Empowerment in CCI as an extension of the current PD work with children.

Increasingly, IoT kits are used in pedagogical contexts to support learning experiences and teach students about IoT. However, few of them focus on both the technical aspects and the societal implications of IoT, such as cybersecurity and privacy. In this paper, we describe the Orbit IoT Kit, a micro:bit-based toolkit that supports teachers in IoT activities. The kit combines the microcontroller with relays and a web application, enabling students to connect everyday objects to the Internet and visualize the devices’ data flow. Based on an intervention in a secondary school with 3 teachers and 20 students of ages 12-13, our results indicate that the design and features of the kit — internet communication and data visualization — support teachers to engage students in learning about a holistic perspective of IoT. We reflect on our research propositions, discuss design strategies, and present three design recommendations for IoT toolkits: Connectivity, Visualization, and Openness.

Technologies based on AI/ML are playing an increasingly prominent role in teenagers’ everyday lives. Mirroring this trend is a concomitant interest in teaching young people about intelligent technologies. Whereas previous research in the field of Child–Computer Interaction has proposed curriculum and learning activities that describe what teenagers need to learn about AI/ML, there is still a shortage of studies which specifically address teenager-centered perspectives in the teaching of AI/ML. This paper presents a study of teenagers’ everyday understanding of AI/ML technologies. Using a thematic analysis of the teenagers’ own explanations during a series of workshops, we present a conceptual map of the teenagers’ understandings of these technologies. We go on to propose five general recommendations for the teaching of AI/ML to teenagers through the lens of Computational Empowerment. Taken together, these recommendations serve as a teenage-centered starting point for teaching young people about intelligent technologies, an approach that can be implemented in future research interventions with similar objectives.

As child-robot interactions become more and more common in daily life environment, it is important to examine how robot’s errors influence children’s behavior. We explored how a robot’s unexpected behaviors affect child-robot interactions during two workshops on active reading: one in a modern art museum and one in a school. We observed the behavior and attitudes of 42 children from three age groups: 6-7 years, 8-10 years, and 10-12 years. Through our observations, we identified six different types of surprising robot behaviors: personality, movement malfunctions, inconsistent behavior, mispronunciation, delays, and freezing. Using a qualitative analysis, we examined how children responded to each type of behavior, and we observed similarities and differences between the age groups. Based on our findings, we propose guidelines for designing age-appropriate learning interactions with social robots.

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.

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Children grow up in a data economy but grasping how their data are part of this eco-system and how data become valuable to others can be difficult. This work explores how to design tools and activities which support children’s critical data literacy for K-9 education. We bring together two strands of work; First, insights from a co-design process where teachers and researchers designed tools and activities for teaching critical data literacy which they deployed in a lower secondary education classroom. Second, insights from didactic theories from maths and computer science education about working with multiple and rich representations of complex and intangible phenomena. Based on this we contribute three principles for enriching pupils’ relationship to data in order to inform future research into how pupils can be scaffolded in forming richer relationships to the data-driven technologies in their everyday lives in order to retain agency in a data-driven world.

In this paper, we describe an exploratory study of how design fiction can be used to introduce machine learning (ML) to 14-15 year old students in an engaging way. The study describes three sessions conducted online that combined hands-on and design fiction activities related to supervised ML, focusing on facial analysis. Based on semi-structured interviews and field notes, we discuss how the design fiction approach seemed to be engaging and supportive for students' reflection on their relationship with technology. In future work, we will expand the study to include a larger number of students, assess their learning, and further explore connections between ML and its societal implications.

Research in Full-Body Interaction suggests the benefits of activities based on using embodied resources to strengthen the sensorimotor, cognitive and socio-emotional aspects of the user experience. However, scholars in this field have been often primarily concerned with the comprehension of and design for the user's mind. Little attention has been drawn on its connection to the bodily experience. The scarcity of adequate co-design methods with and for children to raise an awareness of their body during design risks of deriving interaction design decisions only from the perspective of adult designers. In this article, we present our research on novel co-design techniques to elicit children's embodied awareness. These techniques were analysed in the context of a design workshop series with a local theatre school. For the analysis, we used the Think4EmCoDe research framework, a tool to foreground key aspects of an embodied co-design technique for children. Results indicate the benefits of techniques based on physical theatre practice that (1) help children understand their body and space as mediators of ideas and meaning making processes; (2) allow them to incorporate the specific features of Full-Body Interaction in their co-design.

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.

Research based on the embodied cognition framework proposes the use of physicality and spatiality to promote learning. Nevertheless, methods to include children in the design of Full-Body Interaction Learning Environments often neglect to properly integrate the notion of body and space. In this paper, we describe a participatory design process in which we focused on how children can be encouraged to pay attention to their own body, to proxemics and to embodied constraints of the environment. We explored how this awareness may inform children's design choices for a Full-Body Interaction Learning Environment for public spaces. Our findings indicate that our approach promoted children's awareness towards bodily and spatial aspects of their proposals. Our work contributes to the reflection upon the use of bodystorming and theater-based techniques in two contexts: (1) in a simulated environment of the experience and (2) in physical spaces in situ.

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.