In this paper we present the co-design and implementation of an extended reality escape room with 26 primary school students. The aim of our study was to explore the co-design process with students and to co-create a playable escape room, providing an asymmetric immersive experience in which players collaborate. We realised the complexity of designing such an escape room with primary students. We share our experiences and learnings in regard to required capacities and skills of co-designers, and adjustment of complexity and timing to players. We also maintain that the integration of extended reality technologies into escape rooms requires further research to realise asymmetric co-located collaboration.

We present a virtual learning space station, a design space, which was co-designed by 63 school children from three continents, namely Namibia, Malaysia and Finland. The design space station is developed on the Ohyay platform for children by children to plan, interact and conduct co-design activities. In our hands-on demonstration, attendees can organise/join a design session and test the online collaboration and facilitation tools provided by the space station. Our demo contributes directly to the IMX 2022 theme of “Interactive Media Brings us Together”.

An increasing trend of digitally enhancing learning provides unique opportunities to expand from local to global learning environments. However, current technologies and educational approaches do not adequately support creative communication and learning for primary school learners across the globe. We maintain that it is important to promote agentic engagement amongst learners by involving them in the design of their own digitally enhanced learning environment. In this study, we connected ten learners from a Namibian and a Finnish school in virtual communications to co-design an interactive map game. Following a research through design approach, we share a detailed account of the case study in which we facilitated a distributed co-design process, using Skype, a custom made VR environment, and Microsoft Whiteboard. We reflect on the co-design sessions, focusing on communication and the design concept evolution contributing to distributed co-design methods and techniques not only for the design community but also as an agentic learning process that could be incorporated into formal learning environments. With a paucity of existing empirical work of geographically distributed co-design with children, our case study provides an empirical foundation pointing at critical issues to be further investigated such as multilingual design, social cohesion, facilitation roles, technologies, design breadcrumbs, negotiations and learner’s pride.

We report on a participatory design project that explored the use of child-created Personas to enable child designers to empathize with other children thereby contributing multiple divergent perspectives. The ongoing project aims to promote reading and creative writing skills among young children in Namibia. For decades libraries worldwide have been the key actors in fostering reading. Hence, in order to maintain their relevance, they are being re-conceptualized to cater for new needs and aspirations in the 21st century. In Namibia, dysfunctional public and school library services are lagging behind in this renovation effort, and are not contributing to the promotion of a reading culture. In an ongoing collaboration with a school in Windhoek, to design and implement an interactive tech library, 19 young learners engaged in weekly participatory design workshops to redesign their own school library. The children first created four distinct Personas for which they then modelled spaces and technologies. This paper reflects on the techniques used to enable children to become active design partners and to gain an understanding of designing for other children.