NOVIX is an early‑stage extended reality (XR) prototype designed to explore how children understand interactions in non‑visual XR environments. For the initial co‑design phase, we developed the GhostXR activity, where children engage with a playful, invisible ‘ghost’ through movement, touch, proximity, and haptic/auditory cues. The system combines spatial audio, controller-based light and sound, and vibration cues. Our demo showcases a playable XR experience highlighting how children interpret non-visual agents in XR, how they express possible action–reaction loops, and how multisensory feedback supports their meaning‑making.

Technology-enhanced embodied learning has gained traction in HCI, yet deeper insights into how children’s physical actions interplay with their cognitive and emotional states remain underexplored. This study investigates MOVES-NL, an embodied digital learning environment, as a medium for advancing understanding of the dynamic relationship between movement, engagement, and cognitive processes such as stress and learning. MOVES-NL combines movement and immediate formative feedback to foster arithmetic understanding of integers, offering a novel perspective on the integration between embodied interactions and conceptual development. Moving beyond traditional evaluations of learning impact or media comparisons, this work employs multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) integrating motion capture with physiological data to explore the nuanced dynamics of embodied learning. Through a mixed-methods approach integrating both qualitative and quantitative analyses, this study reveals how students’ physical movements relate to cognitive and emotional states, offering actionable insights to support engagement and learning processes. This research advances the understanding of how children’s physical movements relate to their cognitive processes and highlights key considerations for integrating embodied technologies into curricula to foster student engagement and deepen their conceptual understanding, adding value to ongoing conversations about the role of digital technology in children’s education and development.

Multisensory Environments (MSEs) enable different forms of interactions to enhance children’s learning and play. While traditional MSEs are "built-in" to a specific space (e.g., a room or a part of a room), our movable solution, named MOVES, goes beyond these constraints by overcoming their "hardwired" nature and enabling children to play and learn through five different interaction modalities: feet, hand, card, wand, and voice. MOVES wooden structure (see Figure 1) hold several devices such as a PC, 2 projectors, a depth sensor, a LED strip, a RFID card reader, a tablet and a Wi-Fi access point to enable discrete immersivity, to offer children different ways to interact and teachers to be always in control of the experience. This paper focuses on presenting the MOVES technology, along with details about its rationale, design, and usage.

Allowing children to engage in technologically enabled embodied interaction activities has the potential to enhance learning and play. This work leverages the capabilities provided by multisensory environments (MSEs) to address the underlying research question: What are the benefits, challenges, and trade-offs between the various interaction modalities in the context of educational MSEs for children? To answer this question, we designed and deployed MOVES, a MSE-enabler that goes beyond the previous "hardwired" technologies and affords different interaction modalities. We conducted an in-situ field study with 175 children aged 6–10, who engaged with MOVES and the five interaction modalities. We captured children’s experiences (perceptions and actual use) through action logs, data collected from the various sensors (e.g., physiological data from wristbands, skeletal data from motion sensors), and pictorial-based self-reports. The results provide the differences between the various interaction modalities and design considerations aimed at facilitating children’s learning experiences within an MSE.

Embodied learning offers new opportunities to enhance learning effectively, and engage children with stimulating educational experiences. Multi Sensory Environments (MSEs) are spaces that allow for several interaction modalities that stimulate users’ senses and allow the collection of multimodal data. In educational contexts, they provide opportunities to support children’s learning in a playful manner. The use of MSEs is usually carried out with the collaboration of teachers; their perspectives and responsibilities are crucial for the children’s experience. The goal of our research is to uncover evidence-based challenges and opportunities, while considering teachers’ experiences. We conducted fourteen semi-structured interviews with teachers (n = 6) and researchers (n = 8) experienced using MSEs’, and analysed the identified challenges and considerations during a workshop with four Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) experts. We offer a series of implications for consideration when designing and/or using MSEs to support children’s learning.

Embodied learning creates a range of opportunities for children to find new ways to develop their learning by engaging in stimulating activities. This PhD project leverages capabilities offered from multi-sensory environments (MSEs) to amplify children’s interaction and the learning experience. With a goal to achieve the following overarching research question: How capabilities offered from multi-sensory environments can improve the interaction and learning capacity of a system? The first step of the PhD project (that is in the write-up phase), is a literature review that provides a comprehensive basis of theoretical and empirical knowledge in the area of MSEs and children’s learning. The second step (that is underway) is a qualitative research study with a focus on child’s support sphere stakeholders (e.g., parents, teachers, caregivers). Therefore, a series of interviews have been conducted with teachers with experience in employing MSEs to support children’s learning. The results of this study will provide insights on how to design and develop an efficient MSE that takes into consideration stakeholders’ needs. The next, is the development of a conceptual framework on how multi-sensory interaction can support children’s learning; alongside with the respective prototypes. The last step consists of a series of iterative (co-re)design-develop-test cycles, that will allow the refinement of the framework and the respective prototypes, based on the empirical evidence collected from children’s experience. By the end of the PhD project, the necessary prototypes, empirical and conceptual knowledge will give us all the necessary components for enabling multi-sensory capabilities to reinforce children’s interaction and learning. The methodology includes qualitative and quantitative data (e.g., log files, observations, interviews and surveys), collected during in-the-wild studies with children and their support sphere (e.g., teachers and parents).

Identifying and supporting children’s play and problem solving behaviour is important for designing educational technologies. This can inform feedback mechanisms to scaffold learning (provide hints or progress information), and assist facilitators (teachers, parents) in supporting children. Traditionally, researchers manually code video to dissect children’s nuanced play and problem solving behaviour. Advancements in sensing technologies and their respective Multi-Modal Data (MMD), afford observation of invisible states (cognitive, affective, physiological), and provide opportunities to inspect internal processes experienced during learning and play. However, limited research combines traditional video annotations and MMD to understand children’s behaviour as they interact with educational technology. To address this concern, we collected data from webcam, wristband, eye-trackers, and Kinect, as 26 children, aged 10-12, played a Motion-Based Educational Games (MBEG). Results showed significant differences in children’s experience during play and problem solving episodes, and motivate design considerations aimed to facilitate children’s interactions with MBEG.

The dramatic increment of communication impairments among children increases the demand for intensive, highly accessible and low-cost interventions as well as new assessment and therapeutic tools. Our research aims at exploring the use of Conversational Agents (CAs) to support linguistic assessment and training among children with language impairment. One of the open research issues in this arena concerns the identification of the most appropriate form of "embodiment" of the CA for children to interact with. To this end, we evaluated the linguistic performance of 14 neuro-typical children and 3 children with language impairment comparing different CAs - physical object and virtual character - with "traditional" human interaction. Based on our analysis, we identify insights for the design of CA: the physicality does influence the performance of linguistic tasks for children with linguistic impairment. In addition, children seem to show a preference for the physical CA and perceived it as smarter than the virtual one.

The paper describes the design of Ahù, a nomadic smart multisensory solution for children's playful learning. Ahù has a combination of features that make it unique to the current available multisensory technologies for learning: it has a totem shape, supports multimedia stimuli by communicating through voice, lights and multimedia contents projected on two different fields on the floor and allows cooperative and competitive games. The system is nomadic, so it can be moved around, and can be controlled with easy input methods. An exploratory study investigates and provides Ahù's potential to promote engagement, collaboration, socialization and learning in classrooms.