Computational thinking (CT) is increasingly introduced in early childhood, yet teachers often face a gap between young children’s developmental needs, classroom orchestration constraints, and the interaction demands of digital programming activities. We report an iterative, participatory design field study that explores how CT learning activities can be designed and implemented under real classroom conditions. The study focuses on a learning programme for children aged 4–6 that combines unplugged embodied activities, tabletop tangible sequencing, and an Android tablet-based tangible user interface (TUI) prototype called CETA.

Reading motivation often declines as children transition to more complex literary texts, while technology-based interventions frequently conflate surface engagement with intrinsic motivation. We present StoryExplorers, a collaborative literacy activity that combines the turn-based, partially blind Cadavre Exquis (CE) technique with a Wizard-of-Oz GenAI peer and scaffolding cards to support narrative reimagining of canonical literature. In a study with 12 children aged 9-11 using The Odyssey, we examined how this combined design shaped creative divergence from the source text and children’s reported engagement. Findings suggest that the CE mechanic was the primary enabler of participation across reading profiles, while the AI peer plausibly contributed through source-anchored story initiation, introduction of unexpected narrative variation, and synthesised closure. Children produced collaborative adaptations, moral inversions, and narrative pastiche, and qualitative data also suggested a "comprehension inversion," where understanding the source became instrumentally useful for subverting it. The Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) results indicated high Positive Affect and Perceived Competence with low Tension, consistent with the activity’s low-judgment framing. The study contributes an early design account of how structural scaffolding and a bounded GenAI peer can be co-designed to position comprehension as a tool for creative subversion rather than its goal.

This paper introduces the Techno-Biographical Reflexive Atelier (TeBRA), a collaborative autoethnographic method designed to explore how personal narratives intersect with sociotechnical systems over time. Drawing on three editions involving eleven participants, we examine how the method supports situated reflection, creative expression, and collective sense-making around lived technological experiences. TeBRA combines four interconnected elements: techno-biographical narratives, multimodal self-expression activities, retelling of others’ narratives, and collective reflection distributed across four sessions. Using participants’ reflections on artificial intelligence as an illustrative case, we argue that TeBRA supports collective reflection and can serve as a safe space for participants to share concerns, negotiate perspectives, and critically engage with contemporary sociotechnical transformations. We contribute a first-person methodological approach for HCI that expands collaborative autoethnographic inquiry through relational interpretation, multimodal expression, and reflexive engagement with the socio-cultural conditions shaping people’s relationships with technology.

Emotionally challenging experiences are central to player experience in games, and psychological horror provides particularly intense and thought-provoking moments. However, HCI research has largely overlooked how these experiences might influence reflection and mental health awareness. To address this gap, we interviewed two groups of eight players who experienced recent psychological horror games such as Alan Wake 2 and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. Our analysis suggests that player reflection and a broader perspective on mental health are more likely to emerge when a game’s mechanics and narrative allow players to experience the characters’ mental states through gameplay. These findings highlight the potential of psychological horror games to encourage reflection on real-world experiences and offer ethical and future design considerations in crafting narratives centered around mental health.

Figure 1: Examples of children's drawings and drawing activity setting.

This paper presents a participatory design process to adapt JO!, a tangible literacy game, for blind and low-vision children.In collaboration with students and teachers from a public special education school in Uruguay, we conducted classroom observations, interviews, simulator testing, and co-design workshops to identify accessibility barriers and inform the redesign of tangible and digital components.Preliminary findings emphasize the need for simplified multisensory cues, adaptable physical elements, and supportive audio feedback.This work contributes to the inclusive design of tangible user interfaces (TUIs) and highlights how participatory methods can support the development of meaningful educational tools for diverse learners.

Figure 1: Left: Creat'AI, a tangible storytelling prototype designed to teach AI concepts to young children.It includes a keyboard, mirror, external speaker, external enter button, and tangible elements such as QR code cards, paper, and pens.Right: Drawings created by children to interact with the AI and contribute to the storytelling process, depicting a soccer game, a strawberry, and a slice of pizza.

Introductory coding environments have been used in early education to promote computational thinking, supporting the development of cognitive, critical, and social skills. Many environments focus on individual use, which has limited benefits compared to collaborative learning. In this paper, we present the results of a 10-session study at a local primary school engaging eleven children with visual impairments and three inclusive education teachers in collaborative programming activities. Based on participants' behavior, reactions, and feedback, we contribute an improved understanding of collaborative design in educational settings, focusing on the impact of Goals, Workspace, Interdependence, and Shared Awareness. Our main findings outline how collaboration dynamics can be shaped by asymmetric tasks, workspace proximity, and group awareness. We further discuss factors that led to a lack of investment in the shared goal and instances of unbalanced collaboration, reflecting on challenges and opportunities for designing collaborative inclusive coding kits.

The relevance of computational thinking (CT) in early education is globally recognized, with Uruguay already incorporating it into kindergarten curricula. However, there is a notable disconnect: existing CT tools, primarily devised for small home groups, fall short in larger classroom settings. To bridge this gap, we developed Robotito VPL – an innovative, free, open-source application tailored to teachers with no programming background. Robotito VPL enables teachers to guide young children in CT learning with Robotito, a robot that engages with its surroundings, supporting a playful, hands-on learning experience for children. This paper presents the results of two usability evaluations with seven teachers. We then translated the outcomes of these evaluations into valuable lessons learned and specific design requirements.

This work-in-progress presents ALMA, an innovative prototype for storytelling with a smart soft toy inspired by Snoezelen principles. Its objective is to improve children’s emotion regulation while facilitating children’s exploration of sensory perceptions, emotion labeling, and self-reflection. While current methods in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) frequently emphasize individual aspects like storytelling or multisensory experiences, there is a gap in interactive storytelling incorporating soft toys that integrate multisensory and Snoezelen principles, despite the well-documented advantages of such integration. By leveraging the synergies between multisensory experiences and storytelling, ALMA seeks to foster children’s emotion regulation and, therefore a holistic development.

This paper introduces a hands-on workshop centered on participatory design (PD) approaches tailored for engaging young children, with a special focus on failures, challenges, and successes in prior experiences within the child-computer interaction (CCI) domain. Although previous efforts have highlighted the advantages of engaging young children in PD, research has overlooked their involvement as co-designers, leading to a lack of exploration and understanding of their unique perspectives and challenges in the design process. Through an interactive session and collaborative activities, this workshop will facilitate discussions surrounding challenges, successes, and lessons learned through PD with young children. By evaluating and exchanging experiences, we aim to enhance our understanding of PD and refine its methodologies for this particular population. By synthesizing the shortcomings, difficulties, and successes of past experiences, the workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to initiate efforts toward closing this research gap. Together we will establish the groundwork for enhanced approaches and a deeper understanding of how to involve young children in PD, which will enhance future efforts in the field of CCI.

The use of technology in education has seen substantial growth. One promising aspect is the adoption of Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), which offer particular advantages for children’s learning by facilitating hands-on experiences with objects, a teaching strategy commonly employed in the classroom. Despite growing research and commercial development, TUIs remain poorly integrated in classrooms. To address this, we developed JO! a TUI for learning language by engaging in a participatory process with teachers and children. In this WiP, we report the results of the first pilot evaluation of JO! in a session designed and led by two teachers in their classrooms, involving 22 students. We found that JO! aligns with teaching strategies, adapts to class dynamics, supports children’s collaboration and engagement, and minimizes classroom disparities.

Neurodivergent children spend most of their time in neurodiverse schools alongside their neurotypical peers and often face social exclusion. Inclusive play activities are a strong vehicle of inclusion. Unfortunately, games designed for the specific needs of neurodiverse groups are scarce. Given the potential of robots to support play, we led a co-design process to build an inclusive robotic game for neurodiverse classrooms. We conducted five co-design workshops, engaging 80 children from neurodiverse classrooms in designing an inclusive game. Employing the resulting design insights, we iteratively prototyped and playtested a tabletop robotic game leveraging off-the-shelf robots. Reflecting upon our findings, we discuss how the longitudinal co-design process (rather than the resulting game) was key in allowing children the space to learn how to accommodate accessibility needs and create inclusive play experiences. We posit the use of co-design to enhance children’s interpersonal relationships, fosters feelings of ownership, and encourages appropriation practices as a strategy to sustain inclusive experiences that extend beyond project timelines or artefact designs.

Horror video games have often been criticized for their negative and unrealistic depiction of mental health, primarily through their portrayal of characters with mental illnesses. Such representations can perpetuate stigma and misconceptions about mental health issues. However, there has recently been a growing interest in accurate portrayals of these characters and how playing these video games could also elicit empathy and mental health awareness. In our study, we explored how a psychological horror game such as Silent Hill 2 could foster empathy and mental health awareness through individual interviews with 11 participants. Our findings revealed that participants gained a deeper understanding of mental health issues and empathy towards characters struggling with mental illnesses by interacting and controlling them. Participants had a greater attachment to the characters' inner struggles and their gameplay was experienced as cathartic. Moreover, our findings highlighted the potential of psychological horror to serve as a platform for character-driven narratives, showcasing how engagement with such games elicited empathy among participants. We contribute to an exploratory understanding that can assist game designers and writers in crafting narratives within the Psychological Horror genre that foster empathy and mental health awareness.

Playful robotics engages children in learning through play experiences while simultaneously developing critical thinking, and social, cognitive, and motor skills through play. Such playful experiences are particularly valuable in inclusive education to promote social and inclusive behaviors. We present TACTOPI, an inclusive and playful multisensory environment that leverages tangible interaction and a robot as the main character. We investigate how TACTOPI supports play in 10 dyads of children with mixed visual abilities. Results show that multisensory elements supported children to experience activities as joyful. Storytelling and guided-play added a layer of meaningfulness to the activities, and the robot engaged children in minds-on thinking. TACTOPI afforded children to engage in collaborative social play and facilitated supportive and inclusive behaviours. We contribute with a playful multisensory environment, an analysis of the effect of its components on social, cognitive, and inclusive play, and design considerations for inclusive multisensory environments that prioritize play.

Play is a central aspect of childhood development, with games as a vital tool to promote it. However, neurodivergent children, especially those in neurodiverse environments, are underserved by HCI games research. Most existing work takes on a top-down approach, disregarding neurodivergent interest for the majority of the design process. Co-design is often proposed as a tool to create truly accessible and inclusive gaming experiences. Nevertheless, co-designing with neurodivergent children within neurodiverse groups brings about unique challenges, such as different communication styles, sensory needs and preferences. Building upon recommendations from prior work in neurodivergent, mixed-ability, and child-led co-design, we propose a concrete participatory game design kit for neurodiverse classrooms: PartiPlay. Moreover, we present preliminary findings from an in-the-wild experiment with the said kit, showcasing its ability to create an inclusive co-design process for neurodiverse groups of children. We aim to provide actionable steps for future participatory design research with neurodiverse children.

Collaborative coding environments foster learning, social skills, computational thinking training, and supportive relationships. In the context of inclusive education, these environments have the potential to promote inclusive learning activities for children with mixed-visual abilities. However, there is limited research focusing on remote collaborative environments, despite the opportunity to design new modes of access and control of content to promote more equitable learning experiences. We investigated the tradeoffs between remote and co-located collaboration through a tangible coding kit. We asked ten pairs of mixed-visual ability children to collaborate in an interdependent and asymmetric coding game. We contribute insights on six dimensions - effectiveness, computational thinking, accessibility, communication, cooperation, and engagement - and reflect on differences, challenges, and advantages between collaborative settings related to communication, workspace awareness, and computational thinking training. Lastly, we discuss design opportunities of tangibles, audio, roles, and tasks to create inclusive learning activities in remote and co-located settings.

Physical manipulatives, such as rods or tiles, are widely used for mathematics learning, as they support embodied cognition, enable the execution of epistemic actions, and foster conceptual metaphors. Counting them, children explore, rearrange, and reinterpret the environment through the haptic channel. Vision generally complements physical actions, which makes using traditional manipulatives limited for children with visual impairments (VIs). Digitally augmenting manipulatives with feedback through alternative modalities might improve them. We specifically discuss conveying number representations to children with VIs using haptic and auditory channels within an environment encouraging exploration and supporting active touch counting strategies while promoting reflection. This paper presents LETSMath, a tangible system for training basic mathematical skills of children with VIs, developed through Design-Based Research with three iterations in which we involved 19 children with VIs and their educators. We discuss how the system may support training skills in the composition of numbers and the impact that the different system features have on slowing down the interaction pace to trigger reflection, on understanding, and on incorporation.

In this half-day workshop, we will explore how to co-design technology in inclusive classrooms where children have diverse sensory, motor, cognitive or behavioral abilities. We will discuss barriers and opportunities in co-designing for inclusion, exploring techniques and tools to support learning in a collaborative environment. We encourage researchers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to participate and provide their expertise and know-how in improving these environments, with an aim to support both inclusion and collaboration; and children’s exploration of their own interests and approaches to learning. We seek to better understand research experiences in these environments, co-design techniques that were successfully used, and what they can teach the broader field of interaction design for children.

Accessible introductory programming environments are scarce, and their study within ecological settings (e.g., at home) is almost non-existent. We present ACCembly, an accessible block-based environment that enables children with visual impairments to perform spatial programming activities. ACCembly allows children to assemble tangible blocks to program a multimodal robot. We evaluated this approach with seven families that used the system autonomously at home. Results showed that both the children and family members learned from what was an inclusive and engaging experience. Children leveraged fundamental computational thinking concepts to solve spatial programming challenges; parents took different roles as mediators, some actively teaching and scaffolding, others learning together with their child. We contribute with an environment that enables children with visual impairments to engage in spatial programming activities, an analysis of parent-child interactions, and reflections on inclusive programming environments within a shared family experience.

Introduction of computational thinking training in early childhood potentiates cognitive development and better prepares children to live and prosper in a future heavily computational society. Programming environments are now widely adopted in classrooms to teach programming concepts. However, these tools are often reliant on visual interaction, making them inaccessible to children with visual impairments. Also, programming environments in general are usually designed to promote individual experiences, wasting the potential benefits of group collaborative activities. We propose the design of a programming environment that leverages asymmetric roles to foster collaborative computational thinking activities for children with visual impairments, in particular mixed-visual-ability classes. The multimodal system comprises the use of tangible blocks and auditory feedback, while children have to collaborate to program a robot. We conducted a remote online study, collecting valuable feedback on the limitations and opportunities for future work, aiming to potentiate education and social inclusion.

Previous attempts to make block-based programming accessible to visually impaired children have mostly focused on audio-based challenges, leaving aside spatial constructs, commonly used in learning settings. We sought to understand the qualities and flaws of current programming environments in terms of accessibility in educational settings. We report on a focus group with IT and special needs educators, where they discussed a variety of programming environments for children, identifying their merits, barriers and opportunities. We then conducted a workshop with 7 visually impaired children where they experimented with a bespoke tangible robot-programming environment. Video recordings of such activity were analyzed with educators to discuss children's experiences and emergent behaviours. We contribute with a set of qualities that programming environments should have to be inclusive to children with different visual abilities, insights for the design of situated classroom activities, and evidence that inclusive tangible robot-based programming is worth pursuing.

The usage of playful activities is common in introductory programming settings. There is normally a virtual character or a physical robot that has to collect items or reach a goal within a map. Visually, these activities tend to be exciting enough to maintain children engaged: there is constant feedback about the actions being performed, and the virtual environments tend to be stimulating and aesthetically pleasant. Conversely, in adaptations for visually impaired children, these environments tend to become poorer, damaging the story at the cost of the programming actions and its dull mechanics (e.g., place a arrow block to move the character forward). In this paper, we present TACTOPI, a playful environment designed from the ground up to be rich in both its story (a nautical game) and its mechanics (e.g., a physical robot-boat controlled with a 3D printed wheel), tailored to promote computational thinking at different levels (4 to 8 years old). This poster intends to provoke discussion and motivate accessibility researchers that are interested in computational thinking to make playfulness a priority.

We present iCETA, an inclusive interactive system for math learning, that enables children to autonomously engage and solve additive composition tasks. It was designed through a set of participatory sessions with visually impaired children and their educators, and supports math learning through the combination of tangible interaction with haptic and auditory feedback. Tangible blocks representing numbers 1 to 5 were used to add or subtract and correctly solve the task embedded in a computerized game. Our approach aims to provide better scaffolding for understanding the abstract concept of a number by working with different representations of that number, as the size of the block, Braille, color and audio feedback.

The benefits of applying technology to education have been often questioned. Learning through digital devices might imply reducing the children's physical interaction with the real world, when cognitive theories hold that such interaction is essential to develop abstract concepts in Mathematics or Physics. However, conflicting reports suggest that tangible interaction does not always improve engagement or learning. A central question is how cognitive theories can be successfully applied to the design of interactive systems in order to achieve enhanced learning experiences. In this paper we discuss the interaction design of a mixed-reality system for mathematics learning for school-aged children. Our design approach combines inspiration from previous frameworks with a user-centered design process with early prototype evaluations. As a result of this process we have created a mixed-reality environment for low-cost tablets and an augmented version of the Cuisenaire rods, a milestone of the manipulatives for mathematics learning.

Mixed-reality environments allow to combine tangible interaction with digital feedback, empowering interaction designers to take benefits from both real and virtual worlds. This interaction paradigm is also being applied in classrooms for learning purposes. However, most of the times the devices supporting mixed-reality interaction are neither portable nor affordable, which could be a limitation in the learning context. In this paper we propose CETA, a mixed-reality environment using low-cost Android tablets which tackles portability and costs issues. In addition, CETA is open-source, reproducible and extensible.

This article details a two-step method of quantifying eye movement transitions between areas of interest (AOIs). First, individuals' gaze switching patterns, represented by fixated AOI sequences, are modeled as Markov chains. Second, Shannon's entropy coefficient of the fit Markov model is computed to quantify the complexity of individual switching patterns. To determine the overall distribution of attention over AOIs, the entropy coefficient of individuals' stationary distribution of fixations is calculated. The novelty of the method is that it captures the variability of individual differences in eye movement characteristics, which are then summarized statistically. The method is demonstrated on gaze data collected from two studies, during free viewing of classical art paintings. Normalized Shannon's entropy, derived from individual transition matrices, is related to participants' individual differences as well as to either their aesthetic impression or recognition of artwork. Low transition and high stationary entropies suggest greater curiosity mixed with a higher subjective aesthetic affinity toward artwork, possibly indicative of visual scanning of the artwork in a more deliberate way. Meanwhile, both high transition and stationary entropies may be indicative of recognition of familiar artwork.