We suggest transformative agency is brought to the forefront of Participatory Design (PD) in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research to scaffold children's active engagement in matters related to digital technology and its effects on society. Based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we define children's transformative agency as their ability to actively change their own matters, their shared matters, or even societal matters for the better and more just society. We report on a framework for analyzing PD research with children and demonstrate how PD can support transformative agency of children through vignettes from two PD projects with children. Based on the vignettes, we provide a set of additional PD aims to consider when integrating the scaffolding of transformative agency explicitly in PD with children. A focus on children's transformative agency will contribute significantly to the maturing field of Computational Empowerment in CCI as an extension of the current PD work with children.

Increasingly, research projects narrate visions of energy communities that portray hopes of more sustainable, democratic energy futures. However, it remains unarticulated how such research narratives are embedded in the design of digital technology for communal energy futures that are situated in everyday life. While sustainable HCI has identified relevant design narratives, little attention has been paid to those of communal energy projects. In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.

Increasingly, IoT kits are used in pedagogical contexts to support learning experiences and teach students about IoT. However, few of them focus on both the technical aspects and the societal implications of IoT, such as cybersecurity and privacy. In this paper, we describe the Orbit IoT Kit, a micro:bit-based toolkit that supports teachers in IoT activities. The kit combines the microcontroller with relays and a web application, enabling students to connect everyday objects to the Internet and visualize the devices’ data flow. Based on an intervention in a secondary school with 3 teachers and 20 students of ages 12-13, our results indicate that the design and features of the kit — internet communication and data visualization — support teachers to engage students in learning about a holistic perspective of IoT. We reflect on our research propositions, discuss design strategies, and present three design recommendations for IoT toolkits: Connectivity, Visualization, and Openness.

Technologies based on AI/ML are playing an increasingly prominent role in teenagers’ everyday lives. Mirroring this trend is a concomitant interest in teaching young people about intelligent technologies. Whereas previous research in the field of Child–Computer Interaction has proposed curriculum and learning activities that describe what teenagers need to learn about AI/ML, there is still a shortage of studies which specifically address teenager-centered perspectives in the teaching of AI/ML. This paper presents a study of teenagers’ everyday understanding of AI/ML technologies. Using a thematic analysis of the teenagers’ own explanations during a series of workshops, we present a conceptual map of the teenagers’ understandings of these technologies. We go on to propose five general recommendations for the teaching of AI/ML to teenagers through the lens of Computational Empowerment. Taken together, these recommendations serve as a teenage-centered starting point for teaching young people about intelligent technologies, an approach that can be implemented in future research interventions with similar objectives.

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Children grow up in a data economy but grasping how their data are part of this eco-system and how data become valuable to others can be difficult. This work explores how to design tools and activities which support children’s critical data literacy for K-9 education. We bring together two strands of work; First, insights from a co-design process where teachers and researchers designed tools and activities for teaching critical data literacy which they deployed in a lower secondary education classroom. Second, insights from didactic theories from maths and computer science education about working with multiple and rich representations of complex and intangible phenomena. Based on this we contribute three principles for enriching pupils’ relationship to data in order to inform future research into how pupils can be scaffolded in forming richer relationships to the data-driven technologies in their everyday lives in order to retain agency in a data-driven world.

Based on a comprehensive account of digital design literacy, we report from an interview study with pioneer teachers to disclose their experiences from teaching design in formal K-9 education. Unique for the study is that the interviewees were highly qualified K-9 teachers with research-based in-service training in design and more than three years of teaching experience in the area. Our findings suggest that digital design literacy supports children's agency and empowerment in relation to digital technology. Moreover, digital design literacy provides children with four broad competence areas of effective teamwork, contextual inquiry, imagination and creation, and design process navigation. Our study also demonstrates that digital design literacy does not fit seamlessly within the path of conventional school courses. Several structural barriers in formal education such as summative assessments, teacher-roles, failure-prevention and children's lack of experiences with open-ended assignments are reported and discussed in relation to previous studies in child-computer interaction research.

As technologies become pervasive, so does participation in memory making. But in contested environments and discourses, certain voices are rarely included in public memory. In this paper, we explore how everyday postcolonial memories of Namibian youth engaged the wider public into a dialogue revisiting narrative of the past in order to explore alternative futures. Voices of the youth were amplified through an experimental participatory public exhibition leveraging interactive technologies. The exhibition resulted from collaborative memory making with marginalised voices, highlighting the role of youth as agents for change in postcolonial Namibia. Experiences from the exhibition showed how meaningful dialogues and interactions between museum audiences, interactive installations and the youth, created new perspectives on postcolonialism, and how exploring everyday memories and materials from the past may contribute to creating inclusive futures. We conclude that new forms of dialogic engagements are created through 'blurred boundaries' between people, their collective memories and technologies.

We suggest that a commitment to political participatory design defines a new role for children in participatory practices--the role of protagonist. The objective here transcends the goal of giving children a voice in design, and addresses more broadly how children can be empowered to shape technological development and critically reflect on the role of technology in their practices. This re-accentuation of political participatory design to formulate the protagonist role is important, because it deepens our understanding of how children may be empowered through design. It is also timely in view of current societal challenges pertaining to training children in twenty-first century skills. Based on a case study, we illustrate how the protagonist role, based on political participatory design, can change the objective, process, and outcome measures of the design process.

This paper introduces an Ecological Inquiry as a methodological approach for designing technology with children. The inquiry is based on the "ecological turn" in HCI, Ubiquitous Computing and Participatory Design that shift the emphasis of design from technological artifacts to entire use ecologies into which technologies are integrated. Our Ecological Inquiry extends Cooperative Inquiry in three directions: from understanding to emergence of social practices and meanings, from design of artifacts to hybrid environments, and from a focus on technology to appropriations through design and use. We exemplify our approach in a case study through which we designed social technologies for hybrid learning environments with children in two schools, and discuss how an Ecological Inquiry can inform existing approaches in CCI.

Yarosh and colleagues voice a need to explicitly reveal values that drive our IDC research studies to avoid 'cargo cult science'. As Scandinavian Participatory Design (PD) approach is a highly values-led design approach, and is gaining importance in IDC research, we discuss the underlying values of democracy, quality of work and emancipation of this approach. We present a case study, Digital Natives, in which the Scandinavian PD approach was put into practice. Here we involved seven teenagers in the design of an interactive museum exhibition. We discuss how this particular approach effects key design activities such as the establishment of the design space, power relations among participants, the dialogical design process, project evaluation and the final outcome of the project. We conclude that the end goal of Scandinavian PD is not necessarily the final research prototype. Rather, in Scandinavian PD, designers strive to provide children with meaningful alternatives to existing technologies. It is to help children realize, that when it comes to the design of future technologies, they actually have a choice.