This paper advances a collective research manifesto for Computational Empowerment (CE) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), grounded in diverse practices across global contexts. Drawing on five cases from Asia, Europe, and North America, we examine how CE commitments materialize in real world settings, revealing both their transformative potential and the tensions they introduce. Our cases illustrate that CE is inherently context dependent, socially situated, and shaped by surrounding structures. We identify key directions for extending CE: embedding critical and ethical perspectives, foregrounding situatedness and relationality, challenging convenient choices, and questioning design assumptions. This involves strengthening children’s agency in shaping computational systems and widening CE’s reach through more inclusive, sustainable practices. We offer this work as intentionally incomplete—an invitation to ongoing dialogue and collective action toward empowering children in computing.

Child–Computer Interaction seeks to support young people in critically engaging with technology through the Computational Empowerment (CE) research agenda. Recently, Transformative Agency has been proposed as a framework for understanding how CE can lead to action. This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary reflections of a cross-case analysis of two middle school interventions using activism-oriented learning to foster TA. We observed that while students demonstrated strong engagement, their possibilities for action remained bounded. Learning designs both enabled and constrained participation, personal relevance supported critique but not action, and making often remained symbolic. We argue for reconnecting CE with participatory design’s political roots by designing for situated action where students can meaningfully influence their everyday sociotechnical contexts.

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach frequently used in design and technology education, yet students’ value judgments underpinning design decisions often remain implicit. In this case study, we examined how a visual inquiry activity embedded in a nine-week DBL project on Sustainable Infrastructure supported values inquiry. The project was co-created with a grade 6/7 teacher and implemented with 30 students. The activity comprised a neighborhood walk to photograph infrastructure, followed by facilitated discussion, value analysis, and synthesis into a community persona and point-of-view statement that anchored later ideation and prototyping. Data included 199 photographs, artifacts, field notes, and ten interviews. Findings show how visual inquiry supported (1) infrastructural noticing, (2) recurring valuation practices (comparison, gaps, use, and social cues), and (3) translation of values into design constraints and features. We discuss implications for educational designers and educators for supporting valuation and values-to-design scaffolds in DBL.

Design-based learning (DBL) can contribute to students' designerly well-being when enabling them to engage with the world through their own personal values and beliefs.Reflecting on and incorporating personally meaningful human values in their designs might in turn provide an avenue to support students' collective agency to engage critically with technology.In this paper, we investigate how value-sensitive design (VSD)-based activities and tools can support middle school students in incorporating their values into design projects.We detail the development and implementation of a Design Values card set and values-focused learning activities in an exploratory case study with 24 grade 6/7 students (ages 11-13) over 18 sessions across six weeks.Findings illustrate students' value hierarchies and reasoning, the card set's role in supporting their design processes, and how their values shaped their final designs.We present implications for educational designers and educators along with future directions for research to support designerly well-being.

Data physicalizations embody a fascinating intersection of design, technology, and data, where physical artifacts encode information through their geometry or material properties (Jansen et al. 201...

Design-Based Learning (DBL) is a promising learning approach to nurture 21st century skills. It requires students to leverage social regulation of learning. However, students in elementary education still need to develop these skills. Tangible User Interfaces might help students move up in the developmental trajectory through providing scaffolds and supporting positive interdependence. In this paper, we present the considerations and design of a tool, TangiTeam, that aims to support social regulation during elementary school DBL activities. We hope to inspire teachers and designers to create scaffolds for social regulation.

Tangibles can model abstract structures. One educational subject where this can be utilized is instruction on data visualization inter- pretation. Data physicalizations, tangible representations of data, offer graspable handles for the users to manipulate data visualiza- tions directly so that they can better understand what information they hold. However, investigations on the applicability of interac- tive data physicalizations in educational settings are still sparse. In this paper, we explore how students reason with an interactive tangible scatterplot through a collaborative data interpretation tool, CoDa. We report the design, development, and the user experiences in an exploratory study where 11 students, in groups of 2 to 4, completed a data analysis task with CoDa. The qualitative results show insights in the process of data interpretation, how interaction with the tangibles influenced these data interpretations, how the system aided collaboration and, overall user experience. We believe the results and implications offer a step towards nurturing future educational applications on interactive data physicalizations.

Participating in physical activity (PA) is beneficial for adolescents' physical and mental development. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to design and evaluate interactive interventions to facilitate adolescents' PA. Despite the knowledge produced by this large number of studies, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) still lacks a comprehensive set of guidelines to guide our design processes, help us make informed design decisions, as well as provide niche for innovation. This paper reports a systematic literature review of studies on technology-supported interventions in adolescents' PA. We reviewed 25 design related studies in HCI over the past 10 years, analyzing 1) the process phases of design practice, 2) the design requirements and related design decisions, and 3) how these phases and requirements are internally related to each other and what are their influence on design value. Our findings suggest four design phases with seven design requirements and its corresponding design decisions emerged in the process of design. Furthermore, we outline a framework to demonstrate the internal relations of design requirements. We generalize opportunities and challenges for supporting the aforementioned design decisions making, and implementing the findings for future design and research on technology-supported adolescents' PA.