Personal data and digital technologies increasingly shape children's daily experiences, but younger children are seldom presented with opportunities to reflect in-depth about their perspectives on personal data, beyond simple warnings about not sharing information online. We present Grasping Data, a set of portable activities aimed at helping children explore what counts as personal data, why some data feel more personal than others, and how meaning changes between audiences and purposes. The demo combines three linked tangible activities: a teddy-bear proxy for card sorting-based discussion, a wooden tangible prototype for self-generated activity data, and a set of shape-changing multi-material objects for embodied interpretation of personal data. For the IDC community, the demo contributes a 10-minute encounter highlighting concrete, research-based, low-tech methods to discuss personal data with young children across formal and informal learning settings.

This paper presents HapticMap and Tactile Garden, an art installation with a demo contribution for IDC 2026 that invites participants to explore school-ground textures through vibrotactile interaction, projected drawings, and tactile surfaces. HapticMap features a touchscreen map of a real school site with a vibrotactile stylus and close-up images of bark, leaves, water and other natural materials. Tactile Garden extends this into a table-based installation built from children’s hand-drawn field sketches, projected onto translucent panels that deliver haptic-audio feedback on touch. The demo and table installation is grounded in a three-session study with 11 secondary school students in Edinburgh, in which outdoor sketching, guided haptic exploration and a return to school grounds was used to foreground touch as a mode of attention. Instead of attempting overly realistic representation of the textures, the system utilises a gap between digital and physical touch as a prompt for comparison, description and discussion. We present this installation as a contribution to IDC discussions around sensory design, place-based learning and ways in which interactive technologies can enable children and adults to notice everyday environments differently.

Emerging technologies such as haptics offer increasing possibilities to support children's learning by exploiting their sense of touch. However, this potential is hindered by an empirical and conceptual gap in understanding the unique affordances of touch as distinct from broader physical interaction. We address this gap through in-depth video analysis of 82 children's (6–11-year-old) exploration and description of natural objects. Analysis revealed much variation in the role of touch across three themes identified from previous literature: children's propensity to touch, touch interaction, and touch communication. Subthemes developed from the data illustrate the importance of disentangling nuanced mechanisms of touch including the novel identification of gestures simulating touch which suggest the embodied internalization of touch experiences. The paper concludes with six intermediate knowledge themes to inform both pedagogical and haptic designs that might tap this undervalued sensory mode to support children's engagement and learning about their natural environment.

This demo presents STEM Charades: an early learning game activity developed within an interaction design project (Move2Learn) examining the role of embodiment in early science learning. The activity invites participants to communicate selected STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) concepts through gesture and whole-body enactment, while others interpret these non-verbal representations through observation and discussion. Drawing on research into embodied learning and the role of gesture in meaning-making, STEM Charades was co-developed with teachers and children to explore how actions and gestures can function as representational resources in early years STEM. In the demo, participants will engage directly in the activity and are invited to critically reflect on how embodied interactions shape the construction of meaning. Rather than presenting evaluated outcomes, the demo positions STEM Charades as a research-informed design instantiation that translates theoretical insights into a pragmatic resource for educators. It aims to provoke discussion within the IDC community about the opportunities and limitations of embodied and multimodal approaches to learning and the implications for scaling IDC outputs.

Data physicalization is a promising approach for empowering children to understand and enjoy their own data. However, it relies on embodied metaphors to convey information effectively. This paper explores how to elicit children’s embodied experiences using a set of shape-changing objects that can inform the design of dynamic physicalizations. We propose a set of auxetic metamaterials, which can bend, twist, scale and shear. Following principles of tangible interaction, we conducted a study with 59 children who participated in four movement-based games before being introduced to the collection of shape-changing tangibles. Children expressed metaphors based on these activities related to concepts such as containers, rhythm, resistance, and semantic analogies, which we categorised into embodied schemas. Our findings reveal that characteristics of the shape-changing tangibles aid children in connecting their bodily experiences to dynamic transformations. Translating these insights into idea sketches, we outline how to tailor these affordable shape-changing mechanisms into usable prototypes.

Unlike any previous generation, children's lives are now highly datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored.They are increasingly vulnerable to data collection from seemingly innocuous toys and devices with cameras, sensors, voice recognition, and geolocation.Yet, children typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually given by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy).Despite regulatory improvements, interdisciplinary approaches remain crucial to empowering children to understand, value, and manage their personal data.How can the IDC community involve children in the design and use of their personal data?This workshop unites experts to explore current practices.1 CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design 1 This workshop merged with "Towards a Research Agenda for Including Children and their Care Ecosystems in HCI" to run a joint workshop: Grasping Data Together: Interdisciplinary Agendas for Engaging Children and their Care Ecosystems with their personal data

A key question is how technologies can influence social interaction in autistic children, and how opportunities for interaction can embedded into design. Here, we present observations from video recordings of autistic children playing with different technological interfaces and use cognitive event analysis (CEA) to identify instances of child-led interactions. Artefacts which fostered interaction include i) visual prompts for collaboration, ii) multi-media feedback, and iii) expansion of opportunities through tangible interactions.

Autistic children find pretend play difficult. Previous work suggests Augmented Reality (AR) has potential in eliciting pretend play in children with autism. This paper presents the evaluation of an Augmented Reality app to help autistic children engage in solitary pretend play. We followed a user-centred design process, involving various techniques and stakeholders. Results from a pre-post study design suggest the AR system is promising in facilitating quantitative aspects of pretend play in autistic children.

The current drive in many countries to teach computing, particularly programming, to all from an early age, has potential to empower and support children in creative and problem-solving tasks. However, there are a number of challenges in ensuring that computing curricula, tools and environments embody appropriate progression and engender motivation for the topic across the school years. This workshop will consider the key research challenges in learning coding throughout childhood, with contributions from developmental psychologists, educators, researchers of children's programming, and designers of developmentally appropriate technologies for children.

The role of physical actions in learning has fostered enthusiasm for developing novel learning representations using emerging technologies such as tangibles. Indeed, as emerging devices blur the distinction between physical and graphical interfaces, it is important to build our understanding of how different forms of action and interaction will affect children's conceptual development. However, the mechanisms underpinning which actions support learning are often unclear. This paper offers a new perspective for examining the role of physical manipulation in learning by drawing a distinction between the actions generated by the hands and the resulting change in external representation. Arguments from existing research are revisited before using this distinction to identify implications for design.

In order to design tangible technologies that are effective in supporting children's learning, it is important to understand what advantages or limitations are afforded by physical manipulation. This paper highlights some of the perceptual and manipulative properties of physical representations with respect to their effect on the problem space and describes how, for certain problem types, these may benefit children's strategies and learning. These arguments are discussed in relation to ongoing research into children's use of physical materials to solve numerical problems, and comparative performance using virtual materials. The paper uses this research to suggest ways in which tangible designs may support learning in this area by building on the advantages of physical manipulation whilst avoiding limiting exploration by constraining the range of actions and possible learning opportunities provided.