Extended reality (XR) technologies have become more advanced and affordable in recent years, leading to greater familiarity and adoption among US families and youth-serving institutions. While these tools show promise in enhancing children's education, healthcare, and recreation, ethical considerations around safety, accessibility, and impact—particularly for children from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—warrant further investigation. This study engaged 17 local, primarily Black, middle school male youth in evaluating and co-designing utopian and dystopian XR use cases to surface their ethical perspectives. We found that our participants emphasized individual responsibilities like self-discipline, self-care, and skepticism of virtual content; broader societal concerns about entrapment and diminished community agency; and design opportunities for promoting equity and access. Based on these findings, we offer design and methodological recommendations to better integrate the perspectives of male youth targeted for racial oppression into XR innovation to ensure that these tools are ethical, inclusive, and responsive to the communities they serve.

This paper explores the co-design of "Play Therapy Web/VR", a play therapy application that empowers children to express themselves in a way that is comfortable and aligned with their interests and familiar environments.We conducted two exploratory co-design sessions with the University of Maryland's KidsTeam in November 2024 and January 2025.Using a variety of co-design based techniques (e.g., "sticky noting"), we captured design ideas from the children and observed various types of expressive play.Our codesign sessions afforded children an opportunity to discuss and recognize the value of technology-supported play therapy.Initially, many of the children's views appeared to be rooted in stigmatized perspectives.The structure of our sessions allowed children to share their awareness and possible biases surrounding the idea of therapy overall, which in turn, promoted more nuanced discussions about the value of therapy as a tool for well-being.

The growing use of technology in K-8 classrooms highlights a parallel need for formal learning opportunities aimed at helping children use technology safely and protect their personal information. Even the youngest students are now using tablets, laptops, and apps to support their learning; however, there are limited curricular materials available for elementary and middle school children on digital privacy and security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed a series of micro-lessons to help K-8 children learn about digital privacy and security at school. We first conducted a formative study by interviewing elementary school teachers to identify the design needs for digital privacy and security lessons. We then developed micro-lessons--multiple 15-20 minute activities designed to be easily inserted into the existing curriculum--using a co-design approach with multiple rounds of developing and revising the micro-lessons in collaboration with teachers. Throughout the process, we conducted evaluation sessions where teachers implemented or reviewed the micro-lessons. Our study identifies strengths, challenges, and teachers' tailoring strategies when incorporating micro-lessons for K-8 digital privacy and security topics, providing design implications for facilitating learning about these topics in school classrooms.

Though journaling is often mentioned as a standard practice in sustained adult-child co-design teams, it has received considerably less attention in the literature than other co-design techniques. The lack of clarity about the specific goals and procedures associated with journaling can therefore make it difficult for co-design scholars and practitioners to implement, refine, and build upon this technique in their practice. In my dissertation, I will explore: (1) how adult and child design partners in Cooperative Inquiry (CI) co-design conceptualize the goals and challenges associated with journaling; (2) how reflective journaling can be meaningfully and feasibly integrated into the co-design process; and (3) how supported reflection, using tools and processes co-designed with children, can influence child design partners’ learning and identity development. To answer these questions, I have conducted interviews with children on my co-design team at the University of Maryland (UMD KidsTeam) and adults from across the United States with expertise in CI, in addition to facilitating co-design sessions with UMD KidsTeam aimed at improving our team's journaling approaches. Moving forward, I will build upon this work to prototype co-designed reflective journaling tools and processes to support children's reflection. I will then evaluate the impact of these approaches on children's learning and identity development as design partners over time.

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

Participatory Design approaches involving youth are often guided by a desire to position participating young people as equal collaborators and experts at communicating their lived experiences. However, these conceptualizations often foreground the design process, with less attention paid to the holistic set of resources (values, experiences, perspectives, beliefs) that inform young people's identities and influence how they engage in the process of co-design. In this paper, we share how we leveraged a set of identity, team building, and design techniques in combination with a youth development approach to unpack youth identities and support relationship-building within the context of an intergenerational co-design team of eleven teenagers, two young adult mentors, and five adults. Our preliminary findings suggest that providing young co-designers with opportunities to reflect upon and share their individual multifaceted identities can support the formation of a cohesive collective identity, effective collaboration, and design ideas that are relevant to youth and their communities.

With the rapid shift to remote learning in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and students had to quickly adapt to what scholars have called "emergency remote learning" (ERL). This transition required increased reliance on digital tools, exacerbating privacy and security threats associated with expanded data collection and new vulnerabilities. In this study, we adopt a sociotechnical and infrastructural perspective to understand how these threats emerged through breakdowns and tensions in elementary school ERL. Through interviews with 29 US-based teachers and parents of elementary school students (grades PreK-6), we identify two core findings related to privacy and security. First, we detail three breakdowns in the ERL sociotechnical infrastructure: (1) reduced attention to privacy and security issues as parents and teachers cobbled together a patchwork of tools needed to make ERL work; (2) privacy and security risks that emerged from ambiguous and shifting school policies; and (3) the failure to adapt standard authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords) to be usable by young children. Second, we identify tensions between parents' and teachers' desire to help children advance in their education and their desire for children's privacy and security in ERL, as well as tensions resulting from the collapse of home and school contexts. These findings collectively suggest that ERL exacerbated existing--and created new--privacy and security challenges for young students, and we argue these challenges will carry beyond the pandemic due to the increasing use of technology to supplement traditional education. In light of these findings, we recommend researchers and educators use a framework of care to develop social and technical approaches to improving remote learning in order to protect children's privacy and security.