Emerging cryptographic techniques have the potential to transform foundational societal infrastructures, creating a need to teach their possibilities and limitations to support children’s and youths’ agency in this transformation. With this aim, we first surveyed cryptography experts (n=10) about which cryptographic techniques high school students should be taught. Next, we explored how one of the identified techniques, multi-party computation (MPC), can be taught in high school through a co-design process with five teachers. This process led to the design of four hands-on activities, which were evaluated with 96 high school students. Our findings demonstrate how high-school students can engage with an emerging cryptographic technique through hands-on activities that strategically black-box mathematics. We outline future research directions for teaching emerging cryptographic techniques in K-12 education and discuss how child-computer interaction can support children and youth in exploring future opportunities of cybersecurity.

As digital communication has become integral to children’s social interaction, they must understand when and how their privacy is protected. This paper presents the design and evaluation of Bit:chat, a tangible tool that introduces children to secure communication and cryptography through hands-on collaboration, by combining networked micro:bits, a web interface, and paper templates. Drawing on constructivist and collaborative learning, Bit:chat externalizes client–server communication and cryptographic processes into physical artifacts and actions that children can explore and manipulate. Bit:chat was evaluated in an exploratory study in a K–9 classroom setting, and qualitative results illustrate how the tangible design supported engagement, peer collaboration, and exploratory learning. Quantitative results further show improvements in children’s understanding of core concepts of secure communication. We reflect on how tangible approaches can help children connect abstract cryptographic concepts to the technologies in their everyday lives and discuss the challenges and opportunities for designing such tangible tools.

Prototyping multimodal interaction in XR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) is challenging for non-technical designers. Moreover, existing XR prototyping tools do not support concurrent multimodal interaction and lack an overall view of the interaction design of the experience. We created Mucho , a novel no-coding immersive tool for prototyping interactive multimodal XR experiences. Mucho supports three modes: In recording, designers can demonstrate input examples to populate a timeline representation with events. In playback, designers can create a video prototype based on the timeline while adding system actions at the corresponding timeframes. In live mode, Mucho creates a state machine to test the interactive experience in runtime. We present an evaluation by demonstration to illustrate how Mucho can prototype a diverse set of examples including modalities such as hand gestures, proximity, speech, and gaze. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our approach and outline future directions to support immersive prototyping of multimodal XR experiences.

We introduce RoboVisAR, an immersive augmented reality (AR) authoring tool for in-situ robot visualisations. AR robot visualisations, such as the robot's movement path, status, and safety zones, have been shown to benefit human-robot collaboration. However, their creation requires extensive skills in both robotics and AR programming. To address this, RoboVisAR allows users to create custom AR robot visualisations without programming. By recording an example robot behaviour, users can design, combine, and test visualisations in-situ within a mixed reality environment. RoboVisAR currently supports six types of visualisations (Path, Point of Interest, Safety Zone, Robot State, Message, Force/Torque) and four types of conditions for when they are displayed (Robot State, Proximity, Box, Force/Torque). With this tool, users can easily present different visualisations on demand and make them context-aware to avoid visual clutter. An expert user study with three participants suggests that users appreciate the customizability of the visualisations, which could easily be authored in less than ten minutes.

We introduce Augmented Math, a machine learning-based approach to authoring AR explorable explanations by augmenting static math textbooks without programming. To augment a static document, our system first extracts mathematical formulas and figures from a given document using optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision. By binding and manipulating these extracted contents, the user can see the interactive animation overlaid onto the document through mobile AR interfaces. This empowers non-technical users, such as teachers or students, to transform existing math textbooks and handouts into on-demand and personalized explorable explanations. To design our system, we first analyzed existing explorable math explanations to identify common design strategies. Based on the findings, we developed a set of augmentation techniques that can be automatically generated based on the extracted content, which are 1) dynamic values, 2) interactive figures, 3) relationship highlights, 4) concrete examples, and 5) step-by-step hints. To evaluate our system, we conduct two user studies: preliminary user testing and expert interviews. The study results confirm that our system allows more engaging experiences for learning math concepts.

Augmented Reality (AR) has shown great potential for supporting co-located collaboration. Yet, it is rarely articulated in the design rationales of AR systems that they promote a certain socio-spatial configuration of the users. Learning from proxemics, we argue that such configurations enable and constrain different co-located spatial behaviors with consequences for collaborative activities. We focus specifically on enabling different collaboration styles via the design of Handheld Collaborative Augmented Reality (HCAR) systems. Drawing upon notions of proxemics, we show how different HCAR designs enable different socio-spatial configurations. Through a design exploration, we demonstrate interaction techniques to expand on the notion of collaborative coupling styles by either deliberately designing for aligning with physical reality or going beyond. The main contributions are a proxemics-based conceptual lens and vocabulary for supporting interaction designers in being mindful of the proxemic consequences when developing handheld multi-user AR systems.

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Children grow up in a data economy but grasping how their data are part of this eco-system and how data become valuable to others can be difficult. This work explores how to design tools and activities which support children’s critical data literacy for K-9 education. We bring together two strands of work; First, insights from a co-design process where teachers and researchers designed tools and activities for teaching critical data literacy which they deployed in a lower secondary education classroom. Second, insights from didactic theories from maths and computer science education about working with multiple and rich representations of complex and intangible phenomena. Based on this we contribute three principles for enriching pupils’ relationship to data in order to inform future research into how pupils can be scaffolded in forming richer relationships to the data-driven technologies in their everyday lives in order to retain agency in a data-driven world.

There is a growing focus on computational thinking (CT) in terms of supporting children’s understanding of everyday technologies. But unlike other technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) has received limited attention. In this paper, we present ExposAR – a collaborative cross-device AR system enabling children to create, use, and reflect on AR technologies through the co-creation of a simple AR application. With ExposAR, we explore three core design principles: 1) reify computational concepts, 2) support collaborative cross-device authoring, and 3) incorporate the user’s own world. These principles were developed through a co-design process with teachers and evaluated with 46 primary school students. We found that the collaborative authoring process with ExposAR supported students in understanding AR concepts and challenged their perspectives on AR. With these results, we bring AR to the CT agenda and contribute novel design principles for exposing the underlying mechanisms and implications of AR.