The sudden prevalence of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, such as ChatGPT, creates a need for resources to support teachers and students in navigating their use in the classroom. While HCI research has contributed hands-on activities supporting AI literacy, NLP is less explored, and there is a lack of research on how to integrate these tools into teachers’ practices. To address this, we conducted an 18-month Participatory Design process with high-school teachers comprising prototyping, workshops, classroom teaching, and dissemination activities. Through this process, we developed and contribute The Engine Room, a public website with novel digital and unplugged NLP activities that are modular and built around customisable datasets. Our findings show how participatory methods can be used to empower teachers in integrating AI literacy activities into their teaching across various subjects and with a sustained impact. We discuss how a participatory approach can address challenges of designing AI literacy tools and activities.

Emerging cryptographic techniques have the potential to transform foundational societal infrastructures, creating a need to teach their possibilities and limitations to support children’s and youths’ agency in this transformation. With this aim, we first surveyed cryptography experts (n=10) about which cryptographic techniques high school students should be taught. Next, we explored how one of the identified techniques, multi-party computation (MPC), can be taught in high school through a co-design process with five teachers. This process led to the design of four hands-on activities, which were evaluated with 96 high school students. Our findings demonstrate how high-school students can engage with an emerging cryptographic technique through hands-on activities that strategically black-box mathematics. We outline future research directions for teaching emerging cryptographic techniques in K-12 education and discuss how child-computer interaction can support children and youth in exploring future opportunities of cybersecurity.

As digital communication has become integral to children’s social interaction, they must understand when and how their privacy is protected. This paper presents the design and evaluation of Bit:chat, a tangible tool that introduces children to secure communication and cryptography through hands-on collaboration, by combining networked micro:bits, a web interface, and paper templates. Drawing on constructivist and collaborative learning, Bit:chat externalizes client–server communication and cryptographic processes into physical artifacts and actions that children can explore and manipulate. Bit:chat was evaluated in an exploratory study in a K–9 classroom setting, and qualitative results illustrate how the tangible design supported engagement, peer collaboration, and exploratory learning. Quantitative results further show improvements in children’s understanding of core concepts of secure communication. We reflect on how tangible approaches can help children connect abstract cryptographic concepts to the technologies in their everyday lives and discuss the challenges and opportunities for designing such tangible tools.

This paper investigates dialogic learning as a pedagogical lens for designing tools that support critical data literacy (CDL) in K-12 education. We present a research-through-design (RtD) project conducted with three teachers to operationalize dialogic learning in design. The resulting prototype, Datafy, enables students to produce and analyze personally meaningful music data and co-create playlists, fostering critical reflection and dialogue around data practices. Through a classroom observation with 40 sixth-grade students, we show how the tool shaped learners’ collaborative exploration and construction of knowledge about data. We contribute a theoretical framework and an empirical case study of embedding dialogic learning in the design of CDL technologies that promote dialogue and critical engagement with data. We recommend: (1) anchoring co-design with teachers in learning activities and learning goals, (2) designing diverse opportunities for dialogue about critical data literacy, and (3) treating dialogue linked to learning goals as design evidence for tool evaluation.

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Data visualization literacy is vital for preparing students for higher education in data-driven fields, yet instructions and teaching materials for high school remain limited. To address this gap, we applied participatory design (PD) and cooperative prototyping (CP) with high school teachers and data visualization experts as equal partners. Over a period of 16 months, we conducted an interview and four iterative workshops to identify teaching challenges and co-create solutions. This process produced three prototype sets, culminating in a 17-step teaching unit on the CoTinker platform for computational thinking. The unit uses a music dataset and a developed visualization tool to engage students in collaboratively creating data visualizations through hands-on learning while introducing visualization concepts, visual storytelling, and data ethics. Our work demonstrates how PD and CP can bridge research and practice, and contributes a replicable framework for integrating data visualization into high school by use of co-designed tools grounded in real-world classrooms.

Figure 1: To support teachers and students in acting skillfully around AI, we explore how AI technologies and methods can interplay with knowledge and skills in existing school subjects.From left to right: Teachers engaging with AI activities as part of a workshop; students discussing sentences which they are annotating to train a language model; a teacher's lesson plan which integrates machine learning activities into mathematics.

Advances in artificial intelligence present a need for fostering AI literacy in workplaces. While there is a lack of research on how this can be achieved, there are documented successful approaches in child-computer interaction (CCI), albeit aimed at K-12 education. We present an in-vivo explorative case study of how CCI approaches can be adopted for adult professionals via a full-day workshop developed in collaboration with a trade union to upskill workers. Analyzing data from pre- and post-surveys, a follow-up survey, and materials produced by participants (n=53), we demonstrate how this increased participants’ knowledge of AI while their self-efficacy and empowerment did not improve. This is similar to findings from K-12 education, pointing to self-efficacy and empowerment as major challenges for AI literacy across sectors. We discuss the role of ambassadorships and professional organizations in addressing these issues, and indicate research directions for the CHI community.

Computing education is becoming increasingly important in high school curricula, but there are challenges in teaching computing, including teachers' professional development and the development of appropriate learning tools. Participatory design and cooperative prototyping offer opportunities for identifying challenges in computing education and ways for teachers to be involved in the design of new learning tools. This study describes the process of codesigning a learning tool to overcome some of these challenges for computing education in high school, involving teachers, developers, and researchers as collaborators. The study investigating how cooperative prototyping and participatory design can lead to mutual learning about challenges in teaching computing. We prototyped learning activities and the learning tool, CoTinker, in collaboration between six teachers, two developers, and four researchers in four subcases and implemented them in classrooms with a total of 83 students. We show how challenges such as students' collaboration and transfer of knowledge in computing education were overcome by applying the prototypes in computing education classrooms in high school.

Computational thinking (CT) has been recognized as an important part of K-12 education in many countries and is often described in term relating to computer science both in concepts and context. However, the unique practice of computer scientists collaborating on problem solving is often overlooked in CT education in high school. We believe that collaboration is a key aspect of modern computing, and propose to integrate collaborative CT activities into existing high school education. The aim is to prepare students better for exploring computational approaches to high school disciplines as they are practiced in the professional world. Our research question is: how can we design tools for supporting students' collaboration while teaching CT in high school? A new computational environment, CoTinker, has been developed. The tool uses a cross-device approach and foster students' verbal communication and collaboration in groups. The tool was tested in a Biology class. Students' computational thinking (CT) was assessed through learning activities and students' communication was analyzed by audio recordings, of students, imbedded in CoTinker and by focus group interviews with students. Preliminary findings showed students being able to collaborate and solve CT tasks in groups independent of teacher or researchers. Results also indicated that students were able to use, navigate, and critically reflect upon the CoTinker environment.

Based on a systematic review we explore how empowerment has been articulated in 188 papers in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) literature since 2003. Using an existing framework outlining functional, educational, democratic, mainstream, and critical empowerment, our analysis shows that while empowerment is rarely defined in CCI papers, a wide range of different articulations coexists. We explore the prevalence of different articulations in the literature and how this has shifted over time. We show that although empowerment has been part of the CCI discourse since the early days, a shift can be noticed in terms of how empowerment is articulated from an emphasis on empowerment in its functional meaning towards a more even distribution and the advent of critical articulations of empowerment. We conclude the paper by looking ahead into a new decade of CCI research and posing three questions to assist CCI researchers in more clearly articulating the nature and understanding of empowerment.

This video-study explored the types of gestures used by students as they engage in learning activities of computational thinking and modeling in Biology. Participants were twenty-eight students (twenty female, eight male) randomly sampled from five different High School Biology classes. Students were given the educational task of modeling protein synthesis in NetLogo. The design was a concurrent mixed-methods study. The study was situated in a constructivist and embodied cognitive perspective. The objective of the study was to develop a taxonomy table of gestures versus elements of computational thinking. Results showed a significant difference in the distribution of gestures across five concepts of computational thinking. Students used gestures adaptively in order to learn concepts of computational thinking. The findings indicate that students benefit from participating in a learning community where gesturing is seen as an important means of engaging with computing. The taxonomy is a first step towards linking computational thinking concepts with gestures as a means of better understanding student's engagement with computing.

Computational thinking (CT) is emerging as an important theme in computer science and high school education. However, research is needed to develop pedagogies for introducing students to CT. This research study examines the possible synergistic effect of implementing CT into a STEM subject, e.g. biotechnology. The study uses three interventions in which students work with predesigned computer models. Quantitative and qualitative methods are being used to gather data for analyzing students' gain in both content knowledge and CT.

Computational thinking (CT) is emerging as an important theme in computer science and high school education. However, research is needed to inform high-school teachers how to foster students' development of CT in computer science and other subjects. Evidence suggests that agent-based modeling is a valuable way for students to learn CT in different subjects. This paper reports a teaching experiment where researchers, developers, and high school teachers collaborated to develop six NetLogo models. The models were used in nine Danish High Schools in the following four subjects: Biotechnology, chemistry, biology, and social science. Teachers and students had no or very limited experience with programming. Students build CT and content knowledge by using, modifying, and creating code in the models. This paper provides details for others to adopt the models and the underlying CMC framework, which integrates: Coding, Modeling, and Content. The paper evaluates the results from an open-ended questionnaire with all participating students (n=210) and semi-structured interviews with all teachers (n=15). Thematic analysis was applied to categorize the qualitative data. Results showed that students were able to use, modify, and create code in NetLogo that enabled them to develop CT and content knowledge. The CMC framework represents a fruitful way for teachers to design and teach and for students to tinker with learning CT.