Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology to revolutionize education, socialization, and entertainment. However, alongside its promising applications, concerns about potential risks, particularly for young children, have surfaced. We conducted a survey and interview study with 55 parents and 67 children aged 7-13, to identify ethical concerns and design considerations for VR usage in youth populations. This study contributes to the HCI community by providing empirical insights into the ethical concerns surrounding children’s VR usage, as viewed from both children’s and their parents’ perspectives. These insights stem directly from their perceptions of the risks, benefits, and considerations associated with VR across various usage scenarios. Additionally, our research offers valuable design and research implications for the development of responsible VR practices that balance the advantages and potential risks for children and their families.

Prior research indicates that many adolescents struggle to use social media intentionally, with negative impacts on well-being. This presents an important but under-researched opportunity to improve youth well-being through interaction design. We developed Locus, a mobile application that shapes adolescents’ entry experiences into the social media apps on their phones by prompting them to reflect on their social media intentions before they open an app and at the end of the day. In designing Locus, we combined psychology theories—to identify design targets—with co-design approaches—to design around these targets for youth's lived experiences. Following co-design work with nine teens (Mage=15.7 years), we conducted an open trial field deployment (N = 54; Mage=16.2 years) to explore how Locus was used and experienced by adolescents during their daily lives. Results provide preliminary evidence that in-the-moment interventions for self-regulation skills can support adolescents’ intentional social media use.

This workshop aims to bring together IDC authors, academic researchers, and industry practitioners to collaborate in identifying translation practices to reduce IDC's research-practice gap. To achieve this, we will (1) share successes and challenges in translational IDC research, (2) explore current IDC authors’ practices and needs to share their evidence-based research with practitioners, and (3) derive ideas with and feedback from IDC authors with hands-on activities and lightweight processes to translate their IDC research to meet the needs of industry practitioners who work on children's media and technologies. This workshop will bring together IDC community members with practitioners in industry to envision and develop pathways to a sustainable process to share IDC research.

We investigated the experiences of 15 parents and their tween children (ages 8-12, n=23) during nature explorations using the NatureCollections app, a mobile application that connects children with nature. Drawing on parent interviews and in-app audio recordings from a 2-week deployment study, we found that tweens experiences with the NatureCollections app were influenced by tensions surrounding how parents and tweens negotiate technology use more broadly. Despite these tensions, the app succeeded in engaging tweens in outdoor nature explorations, and parents valued the shared family experiences around nature. Parents desired the app to support family bonding and inform them about how their tween used the app. This work shows how applications intended to support enriching youth experiences are experienced in the context of screen time tensions between parents and tween during a transitional period of child development. We offer recommendations for designing digital experiences to support family needs and reduce screen time tensions.

Examining the values inherent in papers published at IDC provides a lens to our research community and informs the path of future research needs and opportunities. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in all full IDC papers between 2011 and 2019 and a survey with the first authors of 20% of these papers. We examine the types of IDC research contributions, the qualities and behaviors the research seeks to support in children, the role of the child and other stakeholders in the design process, the theories that inform IDC research, and the criteria that guide the technical design choices. We discuss the research contributions and the core value trends over the past two decades of IDC full published papers. We also present the ethical considerations central to the surveyed authors' work. Based on our analysis, we discuss implications and opportunities for future contributions, such as explicit attention to inclusivity in research, encouraging multidisciplinary collaborations, and expanding the qualities our community aims to support in children. These qualities include: focusing on children's sense of autonomy, agency, and empowerment; and children's participation in research as active creators of technology.

Can a mobile application encourage children to spend more time outdoors and promote their connectedness to nature? In this paper, we present results from a three-week experimental deployment study of NatureCollections, a mobile application that allows users to build, curate, and share nature photo collections. Twenty-eight children (aged 9-12) and their parents participated in the study; 15 used the NatureCollections app, and 13 used a basic Photo app. We found that the NatureCollections app significantly increased the time children spent outdoors compared to the Photo app. Children in both groups said they felt happy and excited about spending time in nature. However, children in the NatureCollections group reported that time spent outside with the app increased their curiosity about the types of species and plants they saw and photographed. Children in the NatureCollections group also engaged in nature-based conversations with their parents, and even sought to look up information online about the plants and animals they observed. In contrast, children in the basic Photo app group did not display this level of curiosity about what they saw in nature, and the photos they took were driven largely by the aesthetic qualities of nature elements. Our results suggest that NatureCollections promotes and supports children's connectedness to nature.

Most CS students learn little about accessibility in higher education; this is partly because most CS faculty know little about accessibility. Unfortunately, higher education CS faculty lack a model of professional development for learning to teach new topics. Therefore, we investigated the feasibility of a "micro" professional development model for teaching accessibility in CS courses that could be used at scale. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with U.S. CS faculty, asking them to explore a prototype of a web-based professional development tool that linked accessibility topics to CS topics. We found that many organizational factors limited faculty's autonomy to integrate accessibility in many of their courses. We also found that individual values and knowledge constrained faculty's ability and willingness to both learn and integrate accessibility topics into their courses. However, many faculty expressed desire to teach accessibility in their courses if they had access to even basic accessibility content and materials to use in their courses.

Industry demand for software developers with knowledge of accessibility has increased substantially in recent years. However, there is little knowledge about the prevalence of higher education teaching about accessibility or faculty's perceived barriers to teaching accessibility. To address this gap, we surveyed 14,176 computing and information science faculty in the United States. We received a representative sample of at least one response from 318 of the 352 institutions we surveyed, totaling 1,857 responses. We found that 175 institutions (50%) had at least one instructor teaching accessibility and that no fewer than 2.5% of faculty overall teach accessibility. Faculty that teach accessibility are twice as likely to be female, to have expertise in HCI and software engineering, and to know people with disabilities. The most critical barriers to teaching accessibility that faculty reported were the absence of clear and discipline-specific accessibility learning objectives and the lack of faculty knowledge about accessibility. Faculty desired resources that were specific to the areas of computing in which they teach rather than general accessibility resources and guidelines.

We take a qualitative approach to understanding deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students' experiences with real-time captioning as an access technology in mainstream university classrooms. We consider both existing human-based captioning as well as new machine-based solutions that use automatic speech recognition (ASR). We employed a variety of qualitative research methods to gather data about students' captioning experiences including in-class observations, interviews, diary studies, and usability evaluations. We also conducted a co-design workshop with 8 stakeholders after our initial research findings. Our results show that accuracy and reliability of the technology are still the most important issues across captioning solutions. However, we additionally found that current captioning solutions tend to limit students' autonomy in the classroom and present a variety of user experience shortcomings, such as complex setups, poor feedback and limited control over caption presentation. Based on these findings, we propose design requirements and recommend features for real-time captioning in mainstream classrooms.

This paper examines design workshops as research practice: how workshops bind time and participation in ways that privilege certain types of action and foreclose others. In five workshops we facilitated, we asked members to design a new item from two existing items in need of repair and studied their acts of appropriation and reuse. Although we hoped to explore possibilities for collaborative practice, we more clearly saw what happens when garments with rich histories meet the blunt instrument of workshop interventions. Members aligned anticipated outcomes in opposition to our guidelines and abandoned projects due to personal obligations. In reflecting on these encounters we further show how workshops shape what it means to study collaborative settings. This work contributes a reflective study of workshops that gathers and extends CSCW methods for interventionist inquiry.