Block-building activities are crucial for developing children's spatial reasoning and mathematical skills, yet parents often lack the expertise to guide these activities effectively. BrickSmart, a pioneering system, addresses this gap by providing spatial language guidance through a structured three-step process: Discovery & Design, Build & Learn, and Explore & Expand. This system uniquely supports parents in 1) generating personalized block-building instructions, 2) guiding parents to teach spatial language during building and interactive play, and 3) tracking children's learning progress, altogether enhancing children's engagement and cognitive development. In a comparative study involving 12 parent-child pairs children aged 6-8 years) for both experimental and control groups, BrickSmart demonstrated improvements in supportiveness, efficiency, and innovation, with a significant increase in children's use of spatial vocabularies during block play, thereby offering an effective framework for fostering spatial language skills in children.

Creative Problem-Solving (CPS) promotes creative and critical thinking while enhancing real-world problem-solving skills, making it essential for middle school education.However, providing personalized mentorship in CPS projects at scale is challenging due to resource constraints and diverse student needs.To address this, we developed Mentigo, an AI-driven mentor agent designed to guide middle school students through the CPS process.Using a dataset of real classroom interactions, we encoded CPS task stages, adaptive guidance strategies, and personalized feedback mechanisms to inform Mentigo's dynamic mentoring framework powered by large language models (LLMs).A comparative experiment with 12 students and evaluations from five expert educators demonstrated improved student engagement, creativity, and task performance.Our findings highlight design implications for using LLM-based AI mentors to enhance CPS learning in educational environments.

Online collaborative learning is increasingly important, yet children still face challenges communicating and working together virtually, limiting their engagement in long-term teamwork. To address this, we designed the Children’s Online Long-term Program (COLP), a 16-week online project-based learning program grounded in multiple learning theories. The program was implemented with 67 upper primary school students (Grades 3–6, ages 8–13) across five provinces in China. Results show that over one-third of participants sustained engagement in online teamwork. Interviews with children and their parents further revealed key communication channels, benefits, and challenges. Notably, parents played multiple roles in supporting their children’s collaboration, especially through modeling and guidance. This study contributes to the design of long-term online collaborative learning interventions for children within computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) communities.

In this paper, we present HoloBoard, an interactive large-format pseduo-holographic display system for lecture based classes. With its unique properties of immersive visual display and transparent screen, we designed and implemented a rich set of novel interaction techniques like immersive presentation, role-play, and lecturing behind the scene that are potentially valuable for lecturing in class. We conducted a controlled experimental study to compare a HoloBoard class with a normal class through measuring students’ learning outcomes and three dimensions of engagement (i.e., behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement). We used pre-/post- knowledge tests and multimodal learning analytics to measure students’ learning outcomes and learning experiences. Results indicated that the lecture-based class utilizing HoloBoard lead to slightly better learning outcomes and a significantly higher level of student engagement. Given the results, we discussed the impact of HoloBoard as an immersive media in the classroom setting and suggest several design implications for deploying HoloBoard in immersive teaching practices.