Child–Computer Interaction seeks to support young people in critically engaging with technology through the Computational Empowerment (CE) research agenda. Recently, Transformative Agency has been proposed as a framework for understanding how CE can lead to action. This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary reflections of a cross-case analysis of two middle school interventions using activism-oriented learning to foster TA. We observed that while students demonstrated strong engagement, their possibilities for action remained bounded. Learning designs both enabled and constrained participation, personal relevance supported critique but not action, and making often remained symbolic. We argue for reconnecting CE with participatory design’s political roots by designing for situated action where students can meaningfully influence their everyday sociotechnical contexts.

Virtual reality (VR) offers great promise to expand delivery models for therapeutic interventions to help adolescents develop adaptive emotion regulation skills. Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is an emotion regulation skill that involves changing your thinking to improve your emotional state. However, adolescents face developmental and implementation barriers to do CR successfully. To better understand adolescents’ (15-18 years) lived experience of CR challenges and how they envision VR could support their skills learning and transfer to everyday life, we ran three co-design workshops (N=69). Our research weaves together the workshop findings with prior literature to identify directions for future VR-based CR interventions. From our study results, we generated design strategies leveraging best practices of existing research: embedded and embodied scaffolds, providing different points of view, and externalizing the inner self. To illustrate these strategies in practice, we show how each would work in a challenging emotional scenario identified by adolescents.

Sound is a preferred and dominant medium that people with blindness use to capture, share and reflect on meaningful moments in their lives. Within the timeframe of 12 months, we worked with seven people with blindness and two of their sighted loved ones to engage in a multi-stage co-creative design process involving multiple steps building toward the final co-design workshop. We report three types of sonic mementos, designed together with the participants, that Encapsulate, Augment and Re-imagine personal audio recordings into more interesting and meaningful sonic memories. Building on these sonic mementos, we critically reflect and describe insights into designing sound that supports personal and social experiences of reminiscence for people with blindness through sound. We propose design opportunities to promote collective remembering between people with blindness and their sighted loved ones and design recommendations for remembering through sound.