Immersive Multi-Sensory Environments (MSEs), such as sensory rooms and digitally augmented spaces, provide controlled sensory stimulation through light, sound, visuals, and touch. For children with Special Educational Needs (SEN), these environments can support attention, sensory regulation, and social interaction, particularly when activities are tailored and children are given agency. Despite their growing adoption, most MSEs rely on static configurations and lack systematic approaches to adaptability and accessibility. In addition, limited research addresses how children conceptualize immersive technologies or how engagement and acceptability are influenced by sensors, structured play, and adult mediation. This PhD path will investigate if and how multi-sensory immersive rooms can be designed and adapted to better support children with special educational needs, focusing on adaptability, accessibility, children’s conceptual models, and engagement strategies. Through participatory design and empirical studies, the aim is to produce conceptual frameworks and design guidelines for inclusive and adaptive immersive environments. In this extended abstract, I explain in detail the research questions I aim to answer and the progress made so far toward each.

Children are increasingly using generative AI for co-creative activities, such as storytelling. While co-creativity is inherently about collaboration between children and AI, little is known about how children naturally engage, respond, and negotiate collaboration with AI. To address this gap, we conducted a participatory design study with children (ages 8–13) to examine the roles children and AI take and the strategies children use to align AI’s output with their intent. Our findings introduce four novel child–AI collaboration profiles. We found that children were open to technical AI refinements (e.g., adding details to their drawings) as scaffolds for developing drawing skills, but resisted conceptual transformations (e.g., changing objects) that altered their original ideas. We introduce the Child-Centered Co-creative AI (CCAI, “Kai”) framework, grounded in children’s natural collaborative behaviors during co-creation with AI, to inform the design of future child–AI co-creativity interfaces.