We report on an ongoing user study about the use of an interactive storytelling toy to engage child refugees in learning the language of their host countries, motivated by the scarcity of research regarding the design of technology for this understudied user group. We conducted three workshops with Ukrainian children aged 6-10 years old in the context of an after school activity, exploring how children reacted to different kinds of storytelling activities facilitated by an adult reader, with paper books and digital prototypes. We used the qualitative data gathered from our first two workshops to inform the design of a revised prototype, that was presented to the children in the final workshop. Our contribution consists in preliminary insights and design recommendations for technology specifically tailored to the needs of child refugees who are learning a new language.

In this paper we describe and reflect upon the setup and outcomes of the Research and Design Competition at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference over the years. We frame it against similar initiatives and discuss its achievements so far while suggesting the steps that could increase its visibility and popularity both inside and outside of our academic community. In fact, we believe such an initiative is a great opportunity to state and declare the community’s core principles and values. This is done by having children as protagonists, and listening to and acknowledging their contributions. Reaching out to, inspiring, and rewarding the other adults in the loop, such as parents and teachers, is essential to ensure children’s participation and empowerment. Equally important is actively promoting diversity and inclusion to maintain a healthy and balanced community’s growth. Here, we review progress to date, outline plans for moving forward and establishing this initiative as a fun place for children to interact with new technology, as researchers and practitioners better understand their needs and expectations. Therefore, our primary contribution is a set of guidelines and best practices for it to develop, which is based on a thorough examination of the challenge so far.

In this paper we explore children’s perception of technology by looking at the drawings and descriptive texts submitted to the Design and Research Challenge run for the International Conference on Interaction Design and Children 2022 by 166 children from US, Japan, Portugal and Switzerland aged 7 to 11 years old. We cluster and analyse drawings as a means to elicit the perception, understanding and expectations children have of the role technology can play in supporting connectedness, the theme of the conference. We report differences and similarities across countries, age and gender, as well as discuss the dichotomy between magic and realistic proposals, as it provides an important dimension of the CCI design space. Therefore, we start by looking at the use of drawings for better understanding children’s needs and wishes and move on to explore the children’s sense of technology, to finally reflect on its implications on design.

EPPics is a project that focuses on the concept of creating personalised stories to foster pre-reading skills in preschool children. The children, together with their teachers and parents, are engaged as co-designers in a collaborative design approach. After describing the theoretical foundation of my work, I will detail the steps that I have taken so far: a preliminary user study conducted in a preschool in Lugano and a series of interviews to create child personas. I will then outline the next steps in my research: the design of a interactive storytelling app for children, and the design of a conversational agent to help parents read with their children.

This work in progress proposes a new approach for the design of personas representing children in preschool (aged 3-6 years old). Starting from the need to design technology for the collective use in the classroom, we looked at the group composed by the children and the teacher, the different possible ways teachers relate to children in a classroom context, and the way they work together towards a common goal. In this study, we analyse the dynamics of the group in relation to literacy-building activities and storytelling in school. Considering the inherent difficulty in interviewing children of preschool age, we decided to conduct interviews with teachers and experts and adopt a proxy approach to design of our personas. Using the data gathered from interviews and extracted from the literature regarding child-personas and adult-child reading, we start outlining a framework for the design of teacher-children collective personas in a formal educational context.