While Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research frequently reports successful outcomes, challenges and failures in studies conducted in school context are rarely examined in detail. This paper addresses this gap through a collective reflection on when and how research with children in school contexts can be considered successful, and what challenges threaten such success. Based on decades of CCI experience from fifteen researchers across multiple countries, the study used a structured, multi-phase process informed by confessional research and child-centered ethics. The analysis identifies nine aspects of success across three areas (stakeholder experience, data generation, and children’s engagement) alongside fifteen recurring challenges organised into seven areas. We also map the relationships between successes and challenges, revealing ethically consequential tensions often overlooked in published accounts. The paper offers practical guidance, an analytical vocabulary, and a reflective method to foster more transparent and ethical CCI research in school settings.

This paper advances a collective research manifesto for Computational Empowerment (CE) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), grounded in diverse practices across global contexts. Drawing on five cases from Asia, Europe, and North America, we examine how CE commitments materialize in real world settings, revealing both their transformative potential and the tensions they introduce. Our cases illustrate that CE is inherently context dependent, socially situated, and shaped by surrounding structures. We identify key directions for extending CE: embedding critical and ethical perspectives, foregrounding situatedness and relationality, challenging convenient choices, and questioning design assumptions. This involves strengthening children’s agency in shaping computational systems and widening CE’s reach through more inclusive, sustainable practices. We offer this work as intentionally incomplete—an invitation to ongoing dialogue and collective action toward empowering children in computing.

Even the most comprehensive plans may go awry when working with children and in places such as schools, which results in unexpected challenges or sometimes failures. Yet, research publications seldom report on these failures and events, and meaningful second hand experiences are rarely shared beyond the project or research team, if at all. To break this cycle, we propose a half-day workshop at IDC 2026 for collectively reflecting on project experiences - from (un)fortunate events to failures, to learn and grow as a community. We invite researchers and practitioners, young and experienced, to bring their experiences and to collectively compile a list of lessons for the CCI community. This workshop builds on prior initiatives on learning from failures, with the goal of incorporating regular collective reflections as a practice at IDC.

This paper explores the project management challenges of involving children as genuine members of an information technology development project team. In a game development project with university students and two children, empirical data from workshops and project records reveal tensions between ideals of participation and practical constraints. The study identifies issues with roles, responsibilities, communication, scheduling, and resource allocation. Findings highlight that children’s limited self-management skills necessitate clearer roles, adapted management practices, and more adult support. The paper offers a rare project management perspective to intergenerational participatory design, emphasizing the need for tailored approaches.

This paper examines how children’s capacity to imagine educational futures is shaped by the conditions under which participatory speculative design is introduced. Drawing on workshops with 47 eighth-grade students in India, we explore how scaffolding influences engagement with emerging technologies and future-oriented thinking. Across two sessions, students encountered generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and a social robot, engaging in design fiction and scenario drawing. Our findings show that rather than generating distant fantasies, speculative design enabled a critical examination of students’ existing educational contexts. With careful scaffolding, children articulated transformative visions that challenged exam-centric schooling and prioritized emotional well-being; without it, imaginaries remained anchored to present constraints. We contribute to Child-Computer Interaction research by framing scaffolding as a decolonial intervention essential for future-making in high-pressure pedagogical environments. Specifically, we propose affective scaffolding and agency-preserving design as frameworks to bridge emotional gaps and ensure human-centric innovation in the Global South.

In this paper, we use the Child-Centred Ethics framework to critically reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of twelve (2-4 year) projects with children (ages 2-18 years) in Finland, the UK, India, Japan, and the USA. Our analysis reveals diverse ethical challenges and experiences: adapting materials based on the abilities, interests and agendas of the children, teachers, and schools, considering consent and assent as continuous processes, and exploring impacts beyond the project duration. We also discuss handling data ownership among participants and international collaborators, and managing difficult situations that arise, such as, participants pushing the boundaries of technology and people, technical breakdowns, and in situ negotiations of roles among teachers and researchers. We use our analysis to extend the CCE Framework in two distinct ways; incorporating adult stakeholders and impacts beyond a projects’ lifecycle. Our work contributes to research on ethics in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research, addressing how to plan, implement, and create an impact in CCI projects with children.

Data-driven systems play a significant role in shaping children's experiences, as they interact with data-centric technologies daily through various platforms, including social media.Recent studies have highlighted children's perspectives on these technologies, offering insights into their awareness, concerns, and interactions with data-driven systems.This empirical study positions children as coresearchers, employing participatory and speculative approaches to collaboratively explore the futures of data-driven systems, with a particular focus on social media.Methodologically, we build on nexus analysis to bring understanding on children's ability to articulate concerns on data-centric technologies and imagine alternatives in ways that reflect their needs, aspirations, and social realities.Our findings showcase children's primary concerns about data-centric technologies and illuminate various expressions of agency identified in their speculative fictions.Consequently, we call for the promotion of critical data literacy to foster children's agency within data-driven systems.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

The integration of AI technologies in all domains of life raises ethical debates. Children and young people are not exempt from these discussions since AI is also an increasing part of their lives. This study explores teenagers’ (aged 13 to 16 years) views on AI with a focus on ethical thinking. This is a retrospective empirical study in which data from three cases involving young people in technology learning activities have been analysed to answer the following research questions: (i) What ethical challenges around AI do young people reflect upon and (ii) what ethical dimensions do these reflections connect to? We have adapted an existing framework outlining dimensions of ethical thinking to identify young people’s ethical reflections on AI in various learning activities. Our findings show how young people reflect on AI ethics, even without dedicated teaching on it and are able to consider various dimensions and make connections to everyday uses of AI raising ethical issues. Based on our findings, we advocate for an integrated approach of AI and ethics in learning activities about technology. We believe the framework presented in this study can be a valuable tool to inform further research and practice.

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.

We report how designers support active engagement of neurodiverse children (13 -16 y.o.) in participatory design (PD) through “Design Partnering”. Design partnering denotes a process in which neurodiverse children are teamed up with neurotypical peers to help them overcome cognitive, social, and relational barriers and thus make their engagement more active during design. We contribute with studies of design partnering in three different PD activities: Field studies, Ideation, and Prototyping. We map out the opportunities and challenges we faced in our study when applying design partnering in PD research. We discuss our findings to lay out future studies to be conducted in Child-Computer Interaction research to provide more knowledge on the potentiality and challenges of design partnering in PD.

In this exploratory study we created a digital twin of a Japanese kindergarten and placed it in a metaverse platform, proposing a new interaction paradigm called Parallel-Twin-Worlds where an extended digital twin of the physical environment is created in virtual reality. Seven 5-6-year-old children participated in a treasure hunt, where they first conducted a task in the metaverse environment and then conducted the same task in their kindergarten. Our findings show that children quite effortlessly understood the link between the virtual and real worlds. We assume that this is due to recreating the environment as a digital twin, where the visual correspondence with reality made it easier for users to understand the correlation without the need for special lectures. We propose using the Parallel-Twin-Worlds paradigm for teaching the digital twin concept to children.

Making in a digital fabrication laboratory (Fab Lab) using Fab Lab processes is generally challenging for novice makers, particularly for families with young children. We conducted a qualitative study on family engagement in open-ended digital fabrication activities in an informal Fab Lab setting, where families engaged in 2D/3D designing, laser cutting, and 3D printing. We observed challenging transformations when families moved from brainstorming to digital designing and, subsequently, from digital designing to machine-making a physical object. Fab Lab instructors’ work, parental approaches, and oral discussions, which were all intended to facilitate children's participation in the activities, were central in and intertwined with these transformations, and led to the engagement or disengagement of children. Through this study, we shed light on the challenges families faced and provide insights into how to reduce the complexity of digital fabrication for families who have no prior experience of it as well as into how Fab Lab instructors can help enable young children's participation in the related activities.

Some level of digital technology design skills and competencies is important in any profession but in their education and work life this is often ignored. We explore the potential of Educational Participatory Design (EPD) in transforming work practices within diverse disciplines. This is done through a transdisciplinary case where EPD was used as an approach for transforming language teacher education seen to respond too slowly to technological advancements in society and work life. Based on our findings, we propose EPD as a useful approach for building the design agency of future professionals with various disciplinary and professional backgrounds. In the context of real-life work practice with students as future workers, EPD invites them to act as 'designers' envisioning novel practices and technologies for their own work, engaging their 'users' in the PD processes. EPD as a novel methodological approach integrates design with work practice learning and education and therefore, we suggest, belongs to the core expertise of CSCW research and design interested in the digital transformation of work practices.

Nurturing children's competences needed for their digital futures and inviting them to adopt a protagonist role within design process have recently been emphasized in child-computer interaction research. For children to be able to act as design protagonists, they need design capital. We carried out a project with 13-14-year-olds and inquired under what circumstances the situated design capital of children emerged, enabling them to act as design protagonists without us deliberately steering them towards that. By employing the theoretical lens of nexus analysis, several factors were discovered that mediated children to utilize their situated design capital, including distributed agency, positive peer pressure, peer learning, and identity positioning. The findings imply that children's situated capital emanates from interactional phenomena, within which historical trajectories of the place, children, discourses, ideas, and objects intermingle.

With the forced reboot of our lives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our interpersonal relationships are nowhere yet everywhere. However, opportunities for initiating or maintaining friendships and romance in the physical world have dwindled. Within the context of India where multiple realities exist, the question arises – what is the future of these relationships? In this paper, we present the outcomes of a workshop looking at the future of relationships using design fiction. Participants worked in small teams to create scenarios that critically consider the future of love, friendships, and romance within the Indian context. Through the lenses of criticality, empowerment, and value creation, we examine the design scenarios and the design process including criticality of the designs, empowering experiences of the participants, and the perceived value gained from participating in such a workshop. Our findings indicate the potential of design fiction to allow participants to step out of their comfort zone into a critical stance in discussing love and intimacy. Based upon our findings, we discuss implications for design research, practice, and education.

Public controversies around the unethical use of personal data are increasing, spotlighting data ethics as an increasingly important field of study. MyData is a related emerging vision that emphasizes individuals’ control of their personal data. In this paper, we investigate people’s perceptions of various data management scenarios by measuring the perceived ethicality and level of felt concern concerning the scenarios. We deployed a set of 96 unique scenarios to an online crowdsourcing platform for assessment and invited a representative sample of the participants to a second-stage questionnaire about the MyData vision and its potential in the field of healthcare. Our results provide a timely investigation into how topical data-related practices affect the perceived ethicality and the felt concern. The questionnaire analysis reveals great potential in the MyData vision. Through the combined quantitative and qualitative results, we contribute to the field of data ethics.

Physical space and materials we work with, as well as people we interact with affect the design and making processes. These aspects in relation to 3D designing in alignment with 3D printing need considerable exploration within Child-Computer interaction (CCI) research community. We conducted our case study by collecting 9-full-day-observation and interview data and examining 3D modeling and 3D printing activities, as work duties of 15-17-years-old summer trainees organized at the university. We identified, inspired by nexus analysis, different discourses circulating around these activities of novice young people and how the discourses are intermingled with the space, the materials, and the task at hand in complex ways, constructing and shaping the experience of the young participants. In our research and design implications, by signifying the impact of the people, challenges, tasks, spaces and tools, we provide recommendations for maintaining children's engagement in digital fabrication, significantly 3D designing and 3D printing, activities.

Digital technologies are increasingly used with individuals with special needs for skill-building, social inclusion, and empowerment. However, different stakeholders involved in raising an individual with special needs have different and sometimes conflicting understanding of empowerment and motivations towards it. Using an empowerment framework, we collaboratively analyzed and critically reflected on the design and outcomes of three user studies conducted at a special needs school in New Delhi, India. The studies focused on learning how to make compost out of everyday kitchen waste, to assemble a solar lantern, and to buy groceries from a local store. Findings from the analysis provide insights into the complex socio-cultural conditions that enable, and in some cases limit, empowerment of individuals in an underserved and special needs context. We contribute to discussions on empowerment of children through design and use of digital technologies.

Humor is an inevitable part of human life. Most of us are capable of experiencing and appreciating humor. From this perspective, surprisingly little HCI research can be found scrutinizing the existence, role, and potential of humor in our design practice. The gap remains also related to children and teenagers; there is a lack of studies appreciating the emergence and existence of humor in the design process without intentionally evoking it. Thus, this study examines humor as a naturally occurring phenomenon in the design process. The study was conducted in collaboration with a class of teenagers and their teachers. The study identifies various forms and functions of humor in the design process and reveals its situated, emergent nature as a resource in interaction within design. The study proposes a practical tool for designers for anticipating and potentially facilitating the emergence, forms and usages of humor as an interactional resource in design.

Digital transformation has become a central construct in information systems (IS) research. Current conceptualizations largely attribute transformation to intentionality, focus on transformation within a single organization, or assign technology the role of a disruptive agent of change. Likewise, “digital” tends to be a general category of technology, rather than a specific technology enacted in a time and place. Inspired by Schatzkian practice theory and its site ontology, we suggest a contextual viewpoint on digital transformation and call it “relational digital transformation.” We analyzed the change dynamics in the context of taxi dispatch practice in Finland, studying the changing taxi dispatch platforms over years. We investigated five powerful industry actors: two incumbents, two entrants, and a federation of taxi entrepreneurs. We identified events of change in the material arrangements in sites and explain the changes through the process dynamics in the focal practice. We define relational digital transformation as a process through which practice-arrangement bundles of digital technologies evolve over time. This approach assumes the default nature of an industry is to be found in the changing relations between entities rather than in entities themselves. This provides a theoretical extension to the prevailing views of digital transformation in IS literature. It enables studying digital transformation in retrospect without attributing change agency to any entities or technologies a priori. We also contribute to practice-theoretical IS literature by demonstrating how the applicability of practice theoretical analysis extends beyond microphenomena to larger industry-level changes.

Maker movement has recently gained worldwide recognition. Educating children in making activities has also become advocated. Studies have reported experiences on engaging children in making activities and the importance of nurturing a maker identity in children has been advocated. This study reveals findings from a case where, in the spirit of genuine participation of children, 10--12-year-old children gained initial experiences in design and making activities within an elective mathematics class as part of their primary school education. The study shows that children adopted multiple subject positions and relied on various discourses when describing their experiences. We argue that none of them developed a designer or a maker identity as such during the project, whereas many of the children reported of having developed some sort of meaningful relationship to design and making. We argue that this is a valuable outcome per se. Implications for HCI research and design are discussed.

In this paper, we examine collaborative design projects in school contexts with many different stakeholders. We look at the value created for and by different stakeholders, focusing on value as a benefit, which is experienced – perceived and determined – by the beneficiaries themselves in the value co-creation process. As our focus is in “value-in-use”, i.e., value which emerges through activities taking place in a specific space, time, and context, we define value through subjective experience of people involved. We apply in our study the concept of value co-creation, where value is understood emerging from collaborative activity between actors participating in the activity. We see that the value co-creation lens provides a useful means for the CSCW community to scrutinize and make sense of collaborative design projects. We categorized the perceived value for each stakeholder and discuss how these categories can help in gaining a deeper understanding of the value gained in collaborative design work as well as how value co-creation lens in more general can be used as a tool in collaborative design projects.

Children are growing up in an increasingly digitalized world and concerns for their online safety picture in research and in public debate. We contribute to the discussion about children's online safety through a discourses survey on public discussions carried out in Finland 2014-2015. We reveal that discourses on control, trust and involvement permeate debates on children's online safety, and we argue that this has important implications on the means that we develop for ensuring children's online safety. While some control is needed, instead of risking to lose their children's trust through restricting or monitoring, parents may want to build a trusting relationship with their children so that they can trust children to make good decisions and that the children trust them. There is a need to build technical mediation that is transparent and facilitates building of trust.

Children's participation in information and communication technology (ICT) design is an established interdisciplinary research field. Methods for children's participation have been developed, but a closer link between theory and design has been called for, as well as an examination of various participants influencing children's participation in ICT design. This paper addresses these gaps by introducing the research strategy of nexus analysis as a promising theoretical framework. Especially the concepts of ‘interaction order’ and ‘historical body’ are utilised in the analysis of six empirical studies on ICT design with children. The analysis shows that through the participating children there were also ‘others’ involved, multiple voices to be heard, often invisible but informing design. Some of these ‘others’ have already been acknowledged in literature but the issue has not been examined in depth and common vocabulary for this is lacking. Some practical implications will be offered by illustrating how to consider these concepts in different phases of ICT design: when establishing relationships with children, involving children as participant designers and analysing the results of these participative processes.

During recent years public displays relying on new types of display technologies have made their way to the city scene. In this paper, we present a concept that combines tangible interfaces with such ubiquitous urban interaction. We set out to create a tangible connection between different cities and employed an experience-driven design process towards our concept called 'Who's There?'. We evaluated the concept by using a cardboard prototype with a group of fifteen users in a busy market square, where it generated considerable engagement and discussion with members of the public.

Mobile devices and communication have become ubiquitous in the west and people born to this millennium start interacting with this environment from early on. These digital natives' approach to the world and expectations of how it should operate may differ from that of the digital immigrants'. This creates a risk of a design conflict, where solutions developed by immigrants may fit poorly to the natives' way to do things. It is important to understand digital natives better in order to know what design principles hold true with them. We interviewed 6--7 year old Finnish girls, who had just started school and had gotten their first mobile phone, to understand what their experiences are on using mobile phones, what they think of mobile phone use, and how they use them. This paper reports our preliminary results and proposes possible new avenues for research of digital natives.

This paper summarizes value analysis of adopting technology-supported attendance control service in a primary school. The results are based on a case study that explored a 14-week trial where two classes of elementary school children used an attendance control system that was implemented using networked technology components, including smart cards, NFC enabled mobile phones and card readers, a web-portal, and SMS messaging. The findings from the trial are analyzed from the viewpoint of three end user groups, namely children, parents and teachers. Value modeling adopted from social psychology is used for interpreting the perceived value for each user group.

Near Field Communication Technology (NFC)-enabled attendance supervision trial was arranged at a primary school in Finland during the fall 2008. Total of 23 pupils between ages of 6 and 8 participated in the trial with an emphasis on security. Pupils marked their arrival at and departure from school by touching a smart card reader device or an NFC-enabled mobile phone with a contactless smart card. Teachers did not need to mark pupils' absences or delays in the backend system leaving thus more time for teaching and also enabling parents to receive real-time information on children's attendance. This paper analyzes the data related to the adoption and design process of a novel technology in a school setting. Information about user experience was obtained by using a variety of data collection methods. The findings were analyzed from the viewpoint of three end-user groups, namely children, parents and teachers. Children, as well as their teachers, became very fast familiar with the login/logout process, and the attendance supervision was soon integrated into their everyday school routines. Our analysis shows that a technology-supported attendance supervision system can bring value for all end-user groups.