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.

The Human Computer Interaction community is well positioned to address socio-technical issues in post-digital education. However, relevant research has not fully captured how learning with and about emerging technologies is transforming the teaching profession and associated practices. This oversight hinders the implementation of Computational Empowerment, i.e. the critical deconstruction and creative construction of technology, in classrooms. Thus, this paper builds an empirically-grounded bridge between educational practice and HCI research. Analyzing semi-structured interviews and creative design tasks with 16 teachers, we uncover unarticulated needs and diverse teaching realities and manifest them in several teacher personas. These personas move beyond generic “teacher” concepts and provide actionable requirements to ensure relevant and sustainable HCI research and practice in educational contexts. Our work allows HCI research to anticipate diverse challenges and to develop targeted technological and educational solutions that empower teachers and harness the transformative potential of CE in the classroom.

In the ongoing process of the digital transformation of society, corresponding competencies are required from children more than ever. The concept of computational empowerment (CE) promotes confident and reflective engagement with digital technology, which often falls short in formal education. This work outlines how both entertainment and serious games can be used to support the cause of CE and what opportunities they offer for more empowering learning in school settings. The use of digital games appears to be a promising way to connect with the lifeworld of young people and thus offering a low-threshold and differentiated starting point. In this context, the focus should be placed on a stronger establishment of the protagonist role to empower students to engage with digital technologies in depth. In the Serious Game Changers project, students created their own educational modules on specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using digital games and creating new artifacts as learning objects through remixing game elements. In this project, students should be empowered to become active participants by designing with the help of commercial and serious games. Thus giving them their own voice in future (formal) educational settings and promoting future skills in order to make them self-confident 'protagonists' of their surroundings.

The rapid advancement of digital technology is accompanied by increasing demands for digital literacy education for children and adolescents. Previous works often emphasize the need for promoting empowering learning experiences and creating opportunities for active participation in digitalization. Especially in child-computer interaction research, participatory design (PD) has been established as a means to meet these demands. However, to advance the integration of PD into formal education, it is necessary to align PD’s creative, self-directed, and design-based learning settings with the often tight constraints of formal educational institutions. We consider the identification of suitable assessment and evaluation methods as an important contribution to further this alignment. Thus, this paper outlines preliminary findings from a review of works included in the 2018-2022 IDC conference proceedings, that address the evaluation of PD projects in formal educational settings. Only a small number of publications meet the inclusion criteria based on given constraints in this settings. Finally, we discuss preliminary insights regarding feasible evaluation methods and outline how the scarcity of matching works may point to an important research gap regarding the integration of PD with formal education.

Despite continuous efforts to promote ICT related career paths, statistics still show a clear underrepresentation of women in both ICT professions and education. The Dig-Equality FF project develops a set of educational materials for young adolescents to address this issues early on. The following paper presents a part of this tool box: a gamified survey and reflection tool aiming to identify and tackle potential obstacles on the way to a gender balance in the field of ICT. This playful educational tool gathers data to analyse prevalent gender stereotypes regarding job sectors among young adolescents but also to spark discussion and reflect on related aspects. Thus, we aim to alleviate potential misconceptions and point out new perspectives.

The under-representation of women in IT has multiple possible causes, ranging from sociocultural aspects to individual dispositions and social attribution. This full research to practice paper explores secondary school students' (age 12–15) stereotypical perspectives of computer scientists and possible ways to challenge them. The major goal is to let young students form a more accurate concept of a computer science professionals by alleviating distorted images, often transmitted through media and the environment. Students who might not think of themselves as fitting in the prevalent stereotype of a computer scientist and may even lose interest in the field. Consequently, our approach challenges stereotypes in order to make any effort to raise young students' interest in computer science and in pursuing careers in this field. As part of this endeavor, we analyzed the drawings and descriptions of IT professionals made by 87 students aged 12–15 to determine what sets of preconceived perspectives and misconceptions are present in the learners' minds regarding persons in the IT profession. Our results have shown that that stereotypical views on IT actually exist in students' mindsets, but are subject to change when systematically challenged in a friendly and safe atmosphere. Aside of the scientific contribution, the paper aims to inspire and support educators in their efforts to help women and underrepresented groups in computing outgrow inaccurate stereotypes and to uncover young students' potential interest in the field. With this we aim to contribute to overcoming the gender imbalance and foster more equality in the occupational field of information technologies. Strategically, by creating a more sensitive, diverse and harmonious future that computer scientists knowingly and unknowingly co-shape.

To grant password security, it is still a common practice to request users to comply with a number of rules that need to be met for the resulting password to be valid. Users have no option but to comply with the rules, but is there a specific point where the required rules start being perceived as a nuisance and thus jeopardize security? This paper addresses users' reactions to such a scenario by means of an online survey ( N=51) where users are being asked to create a password following an increasing number of restrictions. We thereby follow their evolving responses as each further criterion is added. Our analysis confirms that the increase in rule complexity has detrimental effects on usability and can lead to workarounds potentially compromising password security.