Children’s lives are increasingly intertwined with AI systems, from recommender algorithms to generative models, raising concerns about potential impacts on children’s agency. Although supporting human agency, autonomy, and empowerment is a widely shared HCI goal, we lack clear definitions of these concepts in designing child-AI interaction. Through a review of 25 recent HCI studies, we find agency is rarely explicitly defined and its conceptualisation varies across something children innately possess and something to be developed. Our literature mapping shows that researchers observed agency through children’s planning and self-regulation, asserting control over AI systems, and critique and re-design of the status quo. Conditions reported by researchers that enable or constrain agency span epistemic conditions, interactional design, social context, and motivational orientation. Our review highlights gaps in research on designing for children’s agency. We advocate for conceptual clarity by drawing upon existing frameworks and highlight the importance of considering children’s agency through a relational lens.

Educational metadata can facilitate search for educational resources, however adding metadata requires time and effort from resource creators and is an often overlooked part of publishing.Previous studies have investigated automated metadata generation and crowdsourced social metadata tagging.This demo presents a prototype browser plugin featuring both automated and crowdsourced metadata to enhance educational resource search.Prototype source code is available at github.com/Vidminas/educational-search-filters.

School teachers around the world use online resources in their teaching.The education systems in which teachers work directly impact their freedom to choose, adapt, and use resources in their classes.This, in turn, influences teachers' information interactions involved in lesson planning and resource preparation, but few studies have investigated this relationship.Based on a semi-structured interview and observation study with 15 school teachers working with the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, a process model is proposed to describe teacher tasks and strategies for finding, using, and sharing educational resources.This study addresses the influence of the education system context and considers implications for design of search systems that support online educational resource search by school teachers.A supplementary open licensed dataset can be found at https://osf.io/a2xs8/. CCS Concepts• Information

This project investigates the needs and challenges of school teachers in Scotland involved in finding, using, and sharing educational resources online. The first exploratory stage comprises interviews with primary and secondary school teachers, teacher trainees, and other school staff to define the processes involved and how these processes are situated in teachers’ work context. The second stage is a review of existing tools that facilitate these tasks. The third and final stage consists of user centred iterative design and prototype evaluation studies, experimenting with potential improvements to online resource discoverability.

Information asymmetries create extractive, often harmful relationships between platform workers (e.g., Uber or Deliveroo drivers) and their algorithmic managers. Recent HCI studies have put forward more equitable platform designs but leave open questions about the social and technical infrastructures required to support them without the cooperation of platforms. We conducted a participatory design study in which platform workers deconstructed and re-imagined Uber’s schema for driver data. We analyzed the data structures and social institutions participants proposed, focusing on the stakeholders, roles, and strategies for mitigating conflicting interests of privacy, personal agency, and utility. Using critical theory, we reflected on the capability of participatory design to generate bottom-up collective data infrastructures. Based on the plurality of alternative institutions participants produced and their aptitude to navigate data stewardship decisions, we propose user-configurable tools for lightweight data institution building, as an alternative to redesigning existing platforms or delegating control to centralized trusts.