Children are increasingly using generative AI for co-creative activities, such as storytelling. While co-creativity is inherently about collaboration between children and AI, little is known about how children naturally engage, respond, and negotiate collaboration with AI. To address this gap, we conducted a participatory design study with children (ages 8–13) to examine the roles children and AI take and the strategies children use to align AI’s output with their intent. Our findings introduce four novel child–AI collaboration profiles. We found that children were open to technical AI refinements (e.g., adding details to their drawings) as scaffolds for developing drawing skills, but resisted conceptual transformations (e.g., changing objects) that altered their original ideas. We introduce the Child-Centered Co-creative AI (CCAI, “Kai”) framework, grounded in children’s natural collaborative behaviors during co-creation with AI, to inform the design of future child–AI co-creativity interfaces.

Policymakers and researchers have emphasized the crucial role of parent-child conversations in shaping children’s digital privacy and security literacy. Despite this emphasis, little is known about the current nature of these parent-child conversations, including their content, structure, and children’s engagement during these conversations. This paper presents the findings of an interview study involving 13 parents of children ages under 13 reflecting on their privacy literacy practices at home. Through qualitative thematic analysis, we identify five categories of parent-child privacy and security conversations and examine parents’ perceptions of their children’s engagement during these discussions. Our findings show that although parents used different conversation approaches, rule-based conversations were one of the most common approaches taken by our participants, with example-based conversations perceived to be effective by parents. We propose important design implications for developing effective privacy educational technologies for families to support parent-child conversations.

Physical multi-touch spherical displays can provide a direct, hands-on, embodied interaction experience with global visualization data like ocean temperatures and currents. However, current commercially available displays may be cost-prohibitive for educational institutions and/or non-profits to acquire. Virtual globe-based visualizations like Google Earth are a potential alternative, but it is not clear how well the interactive affordances of physical spheres may transfer to the virtual. We conducted a within-subjects comparative study with 21 participants who completed similar tasks on a physical and a virtual spherical interface platform, which were designed to be as similar as possible, in order to allow us to compare the interaction experiences. Our results overall showed no significant difference be-tween usability or task time on the two platforms. In their qualitative feedback, participants noticed the differences between the physical sphere and virtual sphere in terms of effort and motor demand. Our research implies that, in resource-constrained environments, a virtual globe can be a sufficient substitute for a physical sphere from a usability perspective.

Children face increasing privacy risks and the need to navigate complex choices, while privacy education is not sufficient due to limited education scope and family involvement. We advocate for informal learning spaces (ILS) as a pioneering channel for family-based privacy education, given their established role in holistic technology and digital literacy education, which specifically targets family groups. In this paper, we conducted an interview study with eight families to understand revealing current approaches to privacy education and engagement with ILS for family-based learning. Our findings highlight ILS’s transformative potential in family privacy education, considering existing practices and challenges. We discuss the design opportunities for family-based privacy education in ILS, covering goals, content, engagement, and experience design. These insights contribute to future research on family-based privacy education in ILS.

This workshop aims to bring together IDC authors, academic researchers, and industry practitioners to collaborate in identifying translation practices to reduce IDC's research-practice gap. To achieve this, we will (1) share successes and challenges in translational IDC research, (2) explore current IDC authors’ practices and needs to share their evidence-based research with practitioners, and (3) derive ideas with and feedback from IDC authors with hands-on activities and lightweight processes to translate their IDC research to meet the needs of industry practitioners who work on children's media and technologies. This workshop will bring together IDC community members with practitioners in industry to envision and develop pathways to a sustainable process to share IDC research.

Multi-touch spherical displays that enable groups of people to collaboratively interact are increasingly being used in informal learning settings such as museums. Prior research on large flatscreen displays has examined group collaboration patterns in museum settings to inform the design of group learning experiences around these displays. However, previous research has shown differences in how users conceptualize interacting with spherical and flatscreen displays, thereby making it important to separately investigate how groups naturally collaborate around spherical displays in a museum setting. The spherical form factor of the display affords new forms of collaboration: unlike flatscreen displays, spherical displays do not have a definite front or center, thus intrinsically creating both shared and private touch interaction areas on the display based on users' viewing angles or physical arrangements. We conducted a 5-day long field study at a local science museum during which 571 visitors (370 adults and 201 children) in 211 groups interacted with a walk-up-and-use collaborative learning application showing global science data visualizations, on a multi-touch spherical display. We qualitatively analyzed groups' natural collaboration patterns including their physical arrangements (F-formations), their collaboration profiles (e.g., turn-taker or independent), and the nature of group discussion around the display. Our results show that groups often engaged in both independent as well as closely collaborative group explorations when interacting around the sphere: physical spacing between group members around the sphere was strongly linked to the way groups collaborated. It was less common for group members to make and accept suggestions or coordinate touch interactions when they did not share the same fields-of-view or touch interaction space with each other around the sphere. We discuss implications for supporting group collaboration in this context which will inform the design of future walk-up-and-use multi-touch spherical display applications for use in public settings.

Interactive spherical displays offer numerous opportunities for engagement and education in public settings. Prior work established that users' touch-gesture patterns on spherical displays differ from those on flatscreen tabletops, and speculated that these differences stem from dissimilarity in how users conceptualize interactions with these two form factors. We analyzed think-aloud data collected during a gesture elicitation study to understand adults' and children's (ages 7 to 11) conceptual models of interaction with spherical displays and compared them to conceptual models of interaction with tabletop displays from prior work. Our findings confirm that the form factor strongly influenced users' mental models of interaction with the sphere. For example, participants conceptualized that the spherical display would respond to gestures in a similar way as real-world spherical objects like physical globes. Our work contributes new understanding of how users draw upon the perceived affordances of the sphere as well as prior touchscreen experience during their interactions.

The future of smart environments is likely to involve both passive and active interactions on the part of users. Depending on what sensors are available in the space, users may make use of multimodal interaction modalities such as hand gestures or voice commands. There is a shortage of robust yet controlled multimodal interaction datasets for smart environment applications. One application domain of interest based on current state-of-the-art is authentication for sensitive or private tasks, such as banking and email. We present a novel, large multimodal dataset for authentication interactions in both gesture and voice, collected from 106 volunteers who each performed 10 examples of each of a set of hand gesture and spoken voice commands chosen from prior literature (10,600 gesture samples and 13,780 voice samples). We present the data collection method, raw data and common features extracted, and a case study illustrating how this dataset could be useful to researchers. Our goal is to provide a benchmark dataset for testing future multimodal authentication solutions, enabling comparison across approaches.

HCI researchers have established a number of evidence-based design recommendations for children's touchscreen interfaces based on developmental appropriateness. Yet, these recommendations are scattered within the academic literature and lack a cohesive framework that makes them accessible to app designers. We created a framework of actionable Touchscreen Interaction Design Recommendations for Children (TIDRC, "tide-rock") by conducting a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. We used our TIDRC framework as a lens to empirically evaluate whether these evidence-based design recommendations were implemented within 50 popular iPad apps designed for children. We found a significant gap between research and practice. On average, only 63% of these apps followed design recommendations for meeting children's cognitive (51%), physical (67%), and socio-emotional (72%) needs. We characterize the nature of this gap and discuss opportunities for closing it when designing mobile touchscreen interfaces for children.