Forging children's nature connections involves affective, sensory, and imaginative engagements, underscoring the value of place-based, tactile, and creative interactions. While craft and making offer potential synergies, many digital approaches for children remain limited to designed artefacts that foster contact in, as opposed to with, nature. Inspired by art-based approaches, this study introduces Hybrid Nature Crafts (HNC) a craft approach that integrates diverse materialities, such as leaves and light, to foster children's connections with nature. To examine how HNC supports these connections, we conducted two workshop series in distinct physical settings with 15 children, documenting their creative processes throughout. This pictorial highlights how craft enables children to notice nature, perform place-making, and construct meanings of and with nature. Findings advance understanding of hybrid approaches and offer practical insights for designing workshops that nurture children's ecological identities through creative making.

Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) aim to support students' regulation of learning by translating complex data into feedback. Yet students, especially those with lower self-regulated learning (SRL) competence, often struggle to engage with and interpret analytics feedback. Conversational generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) assistants have shown potential to scaffold this process through real-time, personalised, dialogue-based support. Further advancing this potential, we explored authentic dialogues between students and GenAI assistant integrated into LAD during a 10-week semester. The analysis focused on questions students with different SRL levels posed, the relevance and quality of the assistant's answers, and how students perceived the assistant's role in their learning. Findings revealed distinct query patterns. While low SRL students sought clarification and reassurance, high SRL students queried technical aspects and requested personalised strategies. The assistant provided clear and reliable explanations but limited in personalisation, handling emotionally charged queries, and integrating multiple data points for tailored responses. Findings further extend that GenAI interventions can be especially valuable for low SRL students, offering scaffolding that supports engagement with feedback and narrows gaps with their higher SRL peers. At the same time, students' reflections underscored the importance of trust, need for greater adaptivity, context-awareness, and technical refinement in future systems.

• To identify cyber-attacks on the AI, users must have some prior understanding of the AI parameters and their normativity. • Multimodal indicators embedded across the ecosystem of AI-enabled devices are an effective way in raising users’ attention to cyber-attacks. • Engaging users to actively diagnose and resolve cyber-attacks on AI-enabled devices in the home context must take into consideration the home routines, and be designed to avoid cognitive overload. • One way to minimise overload is to make use of users’ propensity to generalise their cybersecurity knowledge and skills where possible. AI-enabled devices are increasingly introduced in the home context and cyber-attacks targeting their AI component are becoming more frequent. Moving away from seeing the user as the problem to recognising the user as part of the solution, our research reports on a novel cybersecurity intervention (comprising Explainable AI features, assisted remediation) designed to support users to identify, diagnose and mitigate cyber-attacks on the AI component of their smart devices. We carried out a case study of a bespoke smart heating device inclusive of this intervention and conducted fieldwork with ten households who experienced simulated integrity cyber-attacks over a month. Our research contributes an understanding of how to design AI-enabled devices and their ecosystems to support users to perceive integrity cyber-attacks, offering new considerations for intervention design that exploits multimodal indicators and supports users to troubleshoot themselves the causes as well as actions of cyber-attacks. Contributing to the growing area of human-centred cybersecurity, we evidence the distinctive challenges users face when evaluating integrity attacks on the AI component in the home context.

The climate crisis has created a time of great uncertainty for children and their futures, raising need for new approaches that support children to learn about environmental sustainability (ES) and prepare them for living with climate impacts. Systematic reviews of IDC have highlighted instances of gameful interventions (i.e., game-based learning (GBL), gamification, and game-authoring) that offer meaningful ES learning opportunities, but there is not yet a comprehensive synthesis of how this is achieved. Our paper reports on a systematic review of 39 interventions to interrogate how gameful interventions are designed to foster children's ES learning. Our results contribute four themes: “GBL genres fostering distinct forms of ES understanding”, “gamification as a reinforcer to children's sustainable action”, “game-authoring allowing children to voice their perspectives to critical audiences”, and “transversal skills embedded in gameful interventions”. Based on these findings, the paper proposes design implications for future research in gameful interventions and ES.

Addressing current and future environment and climate-related challenges relies on coordinated efforts from all levels of research, industry, government, and community. Despite this, the potential for the IDC community to contribute to, and lead efforts is yet to be adequately explored. This workshop begins to address this issue by inviting researchers engaged in research involving children, emerging technology, and environmental sustainability to map the research currently going on in this area, the gaps, and pathways for child-computer interaction research to play an active role in net zero and the transition towards environmental sustainability.

Given the current climate crisis, there is an increasing need to get children involved in climate action, so they can champion pro-environmental behaviours into their adulthood. This paper describes the preliminary results from the participatory design of an interactive data visualisation (IDV) dashboard, “Our Eco-Logbook”, aimed to support children's climate action in their schools. IDV are touted for their potential to foster critical self-appraisal and collaboration skills in other domains but has not been examined extensively in the context of climate action with children. We worked with an Eco-Committee and Eco-Coordinator at a partner primary school to develop an open-access resource for schools to use to plan, monitor, and evaluate their climate actions, and get others in the school community engaged. Our future work aims to examine the impact of the tool on children's identities as change-makers and develop the tool for more wide-spread use.

Smart Home Heating Technologies (SHHT) have been designed to improve demand flexibility and energy conservation. SHHT rely on rational theories of energy use postulating that people will use less energy when the energy cost is higher. The inclusion of AI within SHHT is poised to optimise energy use in the future as the introduction of lower carbon energy sources place new demands on the grid. When SHHT is introduced in the home, however, they become situated in temporal heating practices that are shaped by an interplay of materiality, meanings, and competencies. We report findings from a mixed methods field study involving eleven households utilising an AI-enabled SHHT probe ‘Squid’. Taking a temporal focus throughout, our study contributes a new lens as to why households may not fully engage with SHHT's rational design, given that energy conversation is already embedded in their ongoing socio-material practices with heating. Focusing on the AI-human relation, we articulate the necessity for human agency where heating is involved, whilst also advancing an understanding of the new forms of hidden labour that households incur before they can engage with the AI. Crucially, our research informs the ongoing HCI concern over how humans understand AI, raising the question of who is responsible to assess the appropriateness of AI when the effects of human-AI performance remain opaque. Our findings contribute a new theoretical perspective into the intricate relationship between individuals and AI in the home and raise several new design implications for SHHT.

Outcome and elaborative feedback in games can scaffold learners to recognise errors and apply corrective strategies. However, there is little evidence that indicates how children process such feedback. Using an active intervention approach, this study empirically evaluated how three groups of primary-aged children with different profiles-novice readers, children with reading difficulties, and children learning English as a foreign language-attended to, understood, and acted upon feedback within a digital literacy game. Children's gameplay and verbalisations across groups were compared through systematic video analysis. Our findings demonstrate that all readers benefited from visual, non-verbal outcome feedback, which supported accurate interpretations of their performance, but groups attended to it differentially. Older children noticed auditory, verbal elaborative feedback more than novice readers, but all children struggled to understand it, instead relying on implicit knowledge to correct future responses. We conclude by highlighting several contributions to games-based learning research, game design, and pedagogical practice.

The human–computer interaction (HCI) design of educational technologies influences cognitive behaviour, so it is imperative to assess how different HCI strategies support intended behaviour. We developed a neuroscience-inspired game that trains children's use of “stopping-and-thinking” (S&T)—an inhibitory control-related behaviour—in the context of counterintuitive science problems. We tested the efficacy of four HCI features in supporting S&T: (1) a readiness mechanic, (2) motion cues, (3) colour cues, and (4) rewards/penalties. In a randomised eye-tracking trial with 45 7-to-8-year-olds, we found that the readiness mechanic increased S&T duration, that motion and colour cues proved equally effective at promoting S&T, that combining symbolic colour with the readiness mechanic may have a cumulative effect, and that rewards/penalties may have distracted children from S&T. Additionally, S&T duration was related to in-game performance. Our results underscore the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to educational technology research that actively investigates how HCI impacts intended learning behaviours.