Following a review of papers in the ACM DL on ethics and children, this paper shows the growth of interest in this area, summarises the literature found, and then, using detail from 26 papers that offer practical advice, distils a Child Centred Ethics Framework that maps literature onto ethical concerns in relation to the practical application of ethics with children. The framework offers questions and solutions for researchers from the first inception of a project to the dissemination of the results back to the children. The framework is offered as an adjunct to an ethics / IRB document in that it places the child’s experience at the centre of decision-making allowing fuller exploration of aspects like assent, anonymity, inclusion and contribution. As a practical resource that researchers can use, the framework is presented as a living document waiting to be owned by the community.

The 36th International British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Conference took place at the University of York in the U.K. on the and August 28 and 29, 2023. The conference was co-located with INTERACT 2023, the 19th International Conference of Technical Committee 13 (Human–Computer Interaction [HCI]) of the International Federation for Information Processing. A selection of the best papers from that conference was published in Interacting with Computers earlier this year (Volume 37, Issue 3, May 2025). This special issue showcases a selection of the most compelling contributions from the recent HCI Conference, which featured 42 full paper presentations. The papers included here were chosen based on reviewers’ evaluations of the pre-conference manuscripts and the audience’s assessment of both the research and its presentation at the conference. Authors of the selected papers were invited to revise, deepen, and expand their work, resulting in the eight diverse articles included in this issue.

Abstract This paper reflects on participatory design practices within the child–computer interaction (CCI) community, which has a long tradition of advocating the inclusion of children in the design process. The benefits of involving children are widely cited in the CCI literature. However, through a critical analysis of children’s current technology usage, research and industry practice, this paper offers three provocations relating to participatory design and children. The first focuses on what constitutes participatory design, suggesting that the use of children in a single design activity to generate ideas is very distant from traditional participatory design (PD) and thus should not be referred to as PD. the second is that there needs to be a shift toward researching and developing methods to enable children to participate in design activities that align with industry timelines. The final provocation suggests that unless there are some tangible benefits of including children in PD of technology or impact can be demonstrated from the work, then an ethical debate is needed about their role and inclusion. These three provocations are designed to question and stimulate the debate around the benefits and values of including children in the design process. Without a critical reflection on current practices and processes, current trends may continue and design practices within the industry may not evolve.

In a ten-week project with nine school classes across the North West of England we explored ocean health with IT-enabled solutions. We describe the activities carried out under headings of participation, learning, and design. Participation activities, which included recruitment, focused on setting the parameters for children’s inclusion and ensuring they understood how data might be used, and that handing in artefacts to the research team was their choice. Learning happened in an environment of contextual relevance that enabled children to develop data literacy whilst we could explore relevant research questions. Design was a journey from individual to whole-class design, while developing engineering thinking and social cohesion. We reflect on the journey showing that children learned from the activities and acquired a new enthusiasm for their local coastline. We reflect on how our inclusive approach can broaden HCI research to wider communities of children and encourage others to apply our model.

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) is predominantly studied with school aged children. Working with preschool children, generally unable to read or write, involves addressing many challenges around planning, recruitment, and interpretation of findings. There are few examples in the literature of the challenges faced when conducting evaluations of technology with preschool children and very few evaluations conducted for commercial software companies. Our case study paper describes a six-week, twelve session, evaluation study of a commercial app (Lingokids) with children aged three and four in two nursery (preschool / kindergarten) schools. We describe challenges we met and describe how we adapted our plans to fit the context. We show how we were able to explore engagement and learning without gathering any personal data. With our practical tips and reflections, we hope our work will encourage others to work with young children in ways that respect their limited ability to understand assent and participation.

In this workshop, we invite researchers, practitioners and designers to reflect on ethical issues arising from Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research with children. As participatory design research practices require rethinking and innovative adaptation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed, asynchronous and online (D)PD approaches may provide solutions to participation barriers. However, in light of this adaptation, additional ethical complexities may arise. Ongoing collaborative discussion is required to identify and address the different types of ethical issues which may arise when planning and conducting DPD projects with children. This workshop builds on previous workshops held at IDC 2021 and 2020, which provided insights into developing a protocol for a world-wide DPD project with children.

In this paper, we outline a Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research protocol. The protocol is presented through the lens of the World’s Largest DPD Project with children, a hypothetical project in which children address the issue of climate change. The DPD research protocol is based on the protocol template recommended by WHO’s Research Ethics Review Committee (ERC) and on the data from two conference workshops with a total of 45 participants. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) an initial version of a generic DPD research protocol; 2) an exemplification of how to appropriate this protocol for a specific project. We expect this protocol will be iteratively refined and will serve as inspiration for future research practices in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI).

It is widely understood within the field of HCI that participation in research and design activities, especially by children, requires careful planning and execution. Whilst the HCI community, and related groups like IDC, have gone some way to ensure aspects such as the selection and participation of children in research and design work is considered carefully, there has not yet been careful consideration, or reporting, of how children get to find out what has happened to the research that they have contributed to. In this paper we describe how we worked with children in overseas contexts and actively reported back to them the outcomes from the work they contributed to. We describe how our desire to report back influenced the planning the analysis of the data to ensure the results could be packaged in a child friendly way. We offer a simple to use checklist for practitioners and researchers to follow and a challenge for the IDC community to incorporate planned or actual feedback into the reporting of studies.

Within the Child-Computer Interaction community fun and learning have been a prominent, recurring theme. However, despite the general interest, fun is often handled as a commonsense notion, without a commonly accepted definition, underlying theoretical framework and ways of measurements. Without these, both researching, designing for, implementing, and evaluating fun elements in learning activities are challenging, and can result in contradicting findings. This workshop aims to address these issues by bringing together participants from different disciplines with various backgrounds who has an interest and experience in the topic of fun in learning.

In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners as participants in co-designing the protocol for the world’s largest Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) project with children. Participatory Design – whose inclusive benefits are broadly recognised in design – can be very challenging, especially when involving children. The current COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to further barriers to PD with such groups. Recent key barriers include social distancing and government-imposed social restrictions due to the additional health risks to vulnerable children and their families. This disrupts traditional in-person PD (which involves close socio-emotional and often physical collaboration between participants and researchers). However, alongside such barriers, we have identified opportunities for new and augmented approaches to PD across distributed geographies, backgrounds, ages and abilities. We invite the CCI community to examine Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) as a solution for overcoming these new barriers, during and after COVID-19. Together, we offer new ways to think about DPD, and unpick some of its ambiguities. This workshop builds on work conducted in a similar workshop in IDC 2020, and this year will focus on the planning and design of the protocol for the world’s largest DPD project with children.

Child Computer Interaction is concerned with the research, design, and evaluation of interactive technologies for children. Whilst many aspects of general HCI can be applied into this field, there are important adaptations to be made when conducting work for and with children throughout all stages of the design cycle. This course explores the use of five evaluation methods that are presented in the recently launched CCI UX Playbook. The Fun Toolkit, Drawing Intervention, The MemoLine, RAiD and Ethics Toolkits are all described in the course and then will be applied in a hands-on activity. Included in the course will be methods for the analysis of data for research papers as well as cut price techniques for the use of the methods in industrial settings.

This paper reports on a study to understand the effects the MemoLine visualization tool has on the interview process for evaluating long term user experience with children. Modifications were made to the MemoLine to try to improve consistency in reporting periods of no play. A within-subject design study was conducted using the MemoLine with interviews, and just interviews, of a suite of educational games over a 12-week period. The participants were 22 children, aged between 8 and 9 years, from a UK primary school. Three constructs were analyzed: Game Play, Learning and Ease of Use. The results showed that using the MemoLine's visualization tool did not aid the children to recall past experience in comparison to just conducting an interview. In addition, the changes to the tool did not appear to aid consistency when reporting periods of no play and the appropriateness of the MemoLine is critically reflected upon.

The Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Community has a long history of innovating methods and techniques for the design and evaluation of technologies for children. Many innovations have been reported in the academic literature but the uptake of methods by industry has been slow and the community has hitherto failed to seriously consider how best to develop, present and promote their methods beyond academia. The aim of the workshop is to weave together IDC researchers and IDC key personnel coming from the industry, with genuine interest in industry-academia collaboration, into a community interested in building a coherent, high-impact collaboration channel. The goal of the workshop is to encourage a critical discussion and debate about how IDC methods can be further adopted, modified or even extended by the IDC related industry. This workshop is expected to reinforce IDC industry-academia collaboration with an ultimate goal to increase understanding and develop a community of interest that is going to co-develop ideas and novel design approaches that can bring IDC methods closer to the industrial practice

Abstract This paper describes a Virtual Reality (VR) prototype developed to help archaeologists and other stakeholders explore and analyse archaeological data in a more immersive context. We describe a VR reconstruction of Pleito Cave, a fragile world class rock-art site with accessibility limitation. Key stakeholders are identified and a prototype is described that provides a VR platform for visualizing and interacting with complex archaeological data (gathered from techniques such as decorrelation stretch and X-ray fluorescence) virtually ‘in situ’, in a way that would not be possible at the real site. The prototype allows multiple remote users to interact with the cave together remotely providing opportunities for collaborative interpretation and analysis of archaeological data. We also present a survey-based evaluation in which both archaeologists and Native American stakeholders indicate positive responses for measures of both engagement and value. Research Highlights An interactive, multi-user, immersive archaeological data visualization tool is described. Survey evaluation elicits insights into where the system provides value and engagement for key stakeholders. Thematic Analysis provides further design insights for future development of immersive archaeological data visualization tools.

This paper explores the design of voice user interfaces for smart homes with teenagers. The work was motivated by two research questions: How can we co-design voice interfaces with teenagers? and What ideas and expectations do teenagers have in relation to voice interfaces in a smart home? A design process was used which involved the participants initially scripting exchanges with a smart home on paper then prototyping at a higher level of fidelity using a tablet app with speech output. The study was carried out in a high school in the UK with 55 pupils in Year 10 (14--15 years old). This work is the first of its kind to explore the co-design of VUIs with teenagers. The key contribution of this paper is the design method that was used which proved successful and gave insights into the use of dual prototyping fidelities and the impact of scaffolding on the designs produced. Other contributions include the themes which emerged from the designs and a set of four themes related to teenagers' expectation of smart homes. The wide range of findings reported in the paper also bring insights that are valuable to those wishing to design and develop VUIs with and for younger users.

Tablet games are flooding the market and large numbers of these are designed for children. The expansion of quantity has not seen an associated expansion of quality. Studies of the usability of tablet games for children typically take place in laboratory settings and fail to understand the context of use. This paper describes a study of 'at home' use of tablet games with children and their families that sought to examine how such games were played and how parents managed such game play. The children who participated in the study had cognitive, sensory or physical needs and these multiple needs brought many difficulties to the surface for parents mediating tablet use. A thematic analysis using four codes was applied to bring findings from diaries and interviews. Challenges for general tablet game design have emerged around designing for family routines, designing for working together, and designing to scaffold children's understanding.

The development and evaluation of prototypes is an important part of game development. This study aimed to establish whether the form factor, either paper or an iPad, would affect children's ratings of a prototype game. The 42 participants were aged between 7 and 11 and used the Fun Toolkit to measure user experience. The results showed that the form factor had little influence over their overall ratings of the game concept. However, the children rated the aesthetics higher on the paper version compared to the iPad, despite the graphics being identical, suggesting a potential effect of the form factor on this aspect of the prototype. Participants were also asked if they would pay to download the game as a measure of engagement, but their comments indicated that parental controls might influence the results when evaluating monetary transactions with children.

The participation of end-users in the design and evaluation of technologies has long been an important principle in human–computer interaction. This article reports a study to ascertain to what extent children using participatory methods could effectively design for a surrogate population. Fifty children, from a UK primary school, participated in a design activity to specify a serious game for children in Uganda. The children’s designs were analyzed and were shown to have effectively incorporated learning and gaming aspects. Based on these designs a serious game was developed. This new serious game and the commercial game Angry Birds were both evaluated for fun with 25 children in Uganda, using the Fun Toolkit and the This or That method. The results suggested that the children found both games fun, thus confirming that the children in the United Kingdom could effectively design a fun game for a surrogate population. Despite the positive results, the reliability of the evaluation methods is questioned. Inconsistencies were noted within the individual evaluation tools and the comparative results for some constructs yielded a low reliability score. We conclude that further research is required to establish suitable evaluation methods for evaluating fun with children in developing countries.

To encourage ethical practices in participatory design with children the CHECk tool was created. This paper reports on an expert review of the CHECk tool and a validating case study. Four main challenges to the CHECk tool are identified: (1) how to inform children on the research and their role herein, (2) distinguishing between project values and designer or researcher's personal values, (3) accounting for the dynamic nature and social constructedness of values in design, and (4) the emergence of values in all stakeholders including child design partners. We advocate complementing CHECk with interactive storytelling and show how this narrative can be used to not only inform participation and achieve ethical symmetry, but also to negotiate values with child design partners.

There have been a number of studies that have compared evaluation results from prototypes of different fidelities but very few of these are with children. This paper reports a comparative study of three prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity within the context of mobile games, using a between subject design with 37 participants aged 7 to 9. The children played a matching game on either an iPad, a paper prototype using screen shots of the actual game or a sketched version. Observational data was captured to establish the usability problems, and two tools from the Fun Toolkit were used to measure user experience. The results showed that there was little difference for user experience between the three prototypes and very few usability problems were unique to a specific prototype. The contribution of this paper is that children using low-fidelity prototypes can effectively evaluate games of this genre and style.

Inspection based methods are not very well researched in the area of Child Computer Interaction. One such evaluation method is the heuristic evaluation that requires a small number of evaluators to inspect an interface for compliance to a number of guidelines or principles. This paper reports on the development of the Anti-Heuristic Game, a game that has been designed to violate all of Nielsen's 10 heuristics. By developing a game whereby the problems are predefined and largely known, it will be possible to establish the effectiveness of children in identifying and reporting problems using the heuristic evaluation method. If children can perform a heuristic evaluation this will enable the benefits of inspection based methods to be realized within Child Computer Interaction.

Over the past decade many new evaluation methods have emerged for evaluating user experience with children, but the results of these studies have tended to be reported in isolation of other techniques. This paper reports on a comparative analysis of 2 user experience evaluations methods with children. A within-subject design was adopted using 20 children aged between 7 and 8. The children played 2 different games on a tablet PCs and their experiences of each were captured using 2 evaluation methods which have been validated with children: the Fun Toolkit and This or That. The results showed that the Fun Toolkit and This or That method yielded similar results and were able to establish a preference for one game over the other. However, there were some inconsistencies between the results of individual tools within the Fun toolkit and some of the constructs being measured in the This or That method. Further research will try to identify any ordering effects within each method and redundancies within the questions.

This paper investigates the use of drawings as a tool for the evaluation of children's interfaces. In the study, children's experiences on a variety of computer interfaces were captured in drawings. A group of four researchers participated in the coding of the drawings, before the results were aggregated and statistically analysed.

We describe an investigation into the relationship between usability and fun in educational software designed for children. Twenty-five children aged between 7 and 8 participated in the study. Several evaluation methods were used; some collected data from observers, and others collected reports from the users. Analysis showed that in both observational data, and user reports, ratings for fun and usability were correlated, but that there was no significant correlation between the observed data and the reported data. We discuss the possible reasons for these findings, and describe a method that was successful in eliciting opinions from young children about fun and usability.