Figure 1: Examples of children's drawings and drawing activity setting.

To better support children's development of social skills through activities like face-to-face social roleplay, child-computer interaction researchers have employed a variety of strategies, with recent focus on tangible and embodied interactions. This article presents the results of a study conducted in South America focused on supporting face-to-face social roleplay for typically developing preschool children, examining the effect of adding and removing the digital layer of the tangible system. The results of the study provide insights into the challenges of supporting children moving to more complex forms of social roleplay, the diverse impact of adding and removing digital layers of tangible devices across children, and the ways in which what may appear as minor cultural differences can impact the deployment of a system to support social roleplay among preschool children.

In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children's social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children's social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field.

Programmable robots designed for preliterate children are one of the options being explored and put into practice for teaching computational thinking skills to children in preschool and kindergarten. Classroom use of these robots may involve use by groups of children due to cost, logistical, and pedagogical reasons. To understand design factors affecting the social use of these robots, we explored the use of three programmable robots with distinctive design characteristics in a kindergarten classroom. Our findings suggest that programmable robot designs that may work well for use by individual children may cause difficulties when shared by groups of children if not all children in the group are able to easily perceive the input (program), output (robot actions), or program state. Based on these design factors we provide recommendations for the design of programmable robots, their evaluation for social use, and for addressing design limitations with support by adult facilitators.