In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children's socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children's face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children's sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children's socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival's support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival's components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.

Executive functions (EF), a set of cognitive processes necessary for goal-oriented behavior, are critical for children's school outcomes and often lacking when children arrive in elementary school. One of the most promising interventions to address this gap is Tools of the Mind (ToM), a Vygotskyan approach to early childhood education with a strong emphasis on sociodramatic play. One challenge in implementing this kind of play is supporting children in joining play with their peers. In this paper we present a content analysis of an eight-week evaluation comparing implementing ToM-style play with and without technology supports. We found that one specific aspect of the technology supports, a voice agent, played a crucial role in integrating shy children into sociodramatic play.

There has been a dramatic growth in interactive technology use by children under the age of 5 during the past decade. Despite this growth, children under the age of 5 typically participate only as users or testers in the design process in the overwhelming majority of projects targeting this population presented in key child-computer interaction venues. In this paper we introduce play-based design, an age-appropriate design method to give 3-4-year-old children a voice in the design process. More specifically, we contribute a thorough analysis of the use of existing methods to design technologies for children under the age of 5, a summary of the process that resulted in the development of play-based design, a detailed description of play-based design, a qualitative analysis of our experience implementing play-based design with two groups of children, and a discussion of play-based design's place among other methods, its advantages, and limitations.

Face-to-face communication and collaboration are important aspects of children's healthy development. With technology becoming ubiquitous in children's lives, we need to better understand how to best support face-to-face activities when they use technology. My dissertation research will support social physical activities for young children through interactive technologies, where the technology does not distract or impede the social and physical aspects of play. To obtain lessons from existing research, I conducted a content analysis of research design trends relating to face-to-face collaboration systems for children presented in publications between 1991 and 2017. I completed the initial stages of a system to classify collaborative technologies, and I created a system, StoryCarnival, which utilizes Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) to support high-quality, creative social play. My contributions are the design, development, and evaluation of technologies that best support social, collaboration activities through interactive technologies for children under five.

This course will cover child development frameworks from the "classics" that have had a significant impact on interaction design, such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Papert, to more recent ideas, such as dynamic systems approaches. The materials presented will include concepts such as embodiment, emergence, and plasticity. Hourcade will examine how these frameworks can inform the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies for children with the goal of promoting healthy development.

While the design of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) has mostly focused on applications for adults, VUIs also provide potential advantages for young children in enabling concurrent interactions with the physical and social world. Current applications for young children focus mostly on media playing, answering questions, and highly-structured activities. There is an opportunity to go beyond these applications by using VUIs to support less structured, developmentally appropriate activities. In this paper, we describe our first step in pursuing this opportunity through an exploration of voice agents to facilitate high-quality social play guided by a partnership with eight 3-4 year old children. During 24 design sessions, we explored making voice agents tangible and enabling children to control what voice agents say. After analyzing the sessions, we learned voice agents could help keep children socially engaged in play and children liked incorporating the agents with the physical aspects of their play. On the other hand, enabling children to control the voice agents caused distractions from play.