Challenges such as hallucinations, biased outputs, and deepfakes underscore the need for AI literacy that helps users question, verify, and make sense of AI outputs. Furthermore, AI literacy in early childhood education (ages 3-8) remains an underdeveloped research area, compared to the rapidly expanding body of work for adults and older students. Yet significant challenges remain, including limited AI knowledge among caregivers and educators, a lack of validated age-appropriate curricula, and ongoing concerns about overuse, privacy abuse, security risks, anthropomorphism, and misunderstandings of AI capabilities. This workshop brings together researchers, educators, and designers to envision what community-centered AI literacy might look like.

The increasing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems geared towards children necessitates those who design and develop these technologies to understand how to address the emerging ethical questions in their development and use while maintaining a playful, child-friendly approach.Even more importantly, it is crucial to understand how we can address various tensions that have emerged among ethical principles.In this half-day workshop, keynote talks, poster presentations and interactive, "playful by design" will promote hands-on and rights-based design experiences for researchers and practitioners to ideate the benefits and challenges of designing playful and ethical child-AI systems.

In response to the growing psychological challenges children face, this paper presents "Whispers of Hope", a narrative-centered, webbased game integrated with Augmented Reality (AR), designed to cultivate hope, empathy, and emotional resilience in children aged 7 to 11. Drawing upon Snyder's Hope Theory, the game integrates interactive storytelling, reflective daily affirmations, and curated uplifting news to encourage goal-directed thinking and emotional growth.Through a combination of narrative immersion, socio-emotional learning, and accessible AR technology, the system supports the development of core psychological traits, including self-esteem, optimism, and perspective-taking, that contribute to a hopeful mindset.Preliminary user testing indicates high levels of engagement and perceived emotional relevance, suggesting its promise as a novel, child-centered tool for fostering hope through digital play.

As social robots become increasingly integrated into educational activities, it is essential to understand how parental AI literacy and perceptions of robot transparency influence children's learning experiences.This Work-in-Progress paper investigates two distinct robot personalities-Maximus (transparent, expressive) and Flexion (non-transparent, straightforward) to explore how variations in transparency affect parental perceptions in educational settings.Six parents participated in the study, evaluating the robots' communication styles and completing AI literacy assessments.Findings suggest that transparent robot behaviours, such as clear explanations and motivational feedback, enhance parental perceptions.This study represents a preliminary exploration; while limited by a small sample size, it offers important early insights into how transparency and parental AI literacy influence trust and acceptance.Future work will address these limitations by incorporating child perspectives, expanding participant diversity, and integrating adaptive robot behaviours.

Explainability is essential in child-robot interaction, shaping how children build trust, understanding, and confidence in robots.While explainability has been well studied for adult users, there is much less research focused on children, who need age-appropriate approaches.This research looks at how robots can use verbal, visual, and behavioural cues to explain their actions in ways that children can understand.The study is carried out in three stages.The first stage explores how different ways of giving information before the interaction affects how children see the robot.The second stage focuses on finding good explanation strategies during the interaction by using behavioural data and machine learning to help the robot adapt and respond in real-time.The third stage builds an autonomous robot that can explain its actions based on what it learns from the child's behaviour.This work will contribute to developing explainable robot behaviours that align with how children understand technology and provide guidance for designing trustworthy robots across different age groups and settings.

Robot swarms are decentralised systems that use simple rules to achieve collective goals, yet their real-world deployment is limited by a lack of understanding of human trust and perception. This study examines how swarm motion affects the trust of novice users in a service-oriented swarm, using an automated cloakroom as a test case. We conducted 20 human trials, where participants interacted with a swarm exhibiting either structured (grid-like) or organic (adaptive) motion, with performance controlled across conditions. Trust and perception were assessed via self-reporting questionnaires and eye-tracking data. Results indicate that performance and reliability, rather than motion, are the key drivers of trust. However, motion influenced perceived predictability, highlighting its role in designing transparent and user-friendly swarm systems.

Understanding what constitutes children’s well-being in digital environments is fundamental for designing technology that supports children’s development while minimizing emerging risks. This is even more urgent with the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the radical transformations in children’s everyday activities, play, and learning. With this workshop, we aim to co-create an agenda for future actions by mapping the current state-of-the-art research about children’s well-being, identifying policy initiatives and relevant stakeholders that come into play, and reflecting on existing good practices and proposing new ones for digital technology that promotes children’s well-being with a special focus on children from under-represented groups.

This paper presents a preliminary design and development of a novel wristband connected to a mobile application to enhance social interaction among children aged 7-12 years who struggle with expressing themselves in group settings. Targeting pedagogical environments, the wristband can facilitate structured group discussions by allowing teachers to set parameters such as time limits via the app. Each child involved in the group discussion would wear an individual wristband, receiving notifications according to the set parameters. The system not only aids teachers in managing inclusive classroom discussions but also benefits parents by providing valuable insights into their child’s social development. Moreover, it helps children build communication skills and confidence during group interactions. This innovative technology has the potential to positively impact educational settings by fostering inclusive happiness and a supportive environment for children’s social and cognitive growth.