The workshop aims to bring together new interdisciplinary approaches to socio-emotional learning, exploring how interactive artifacts offer the possibility of translating emotions into tangible and physical experiences. By engaging participants in project-based prototyping activities, the workshop will investigate how tangible artifacts can foster interdisciplinary discussion, as well as define concrete principles to transform personal emotions into accessible and shared experiences.

Assessing the usability of interactive systems for preschool children poses considerable difficulties due to their restricted verbal abilities, short attention spans, and tendency to favor adult researchers. Moreover, although numerous technologies for children are intended for group interaction, typical assessment approaches are still predominantly focused on individual use. This work presents the Ape-raisal, a tangible, collaborative usability assessment tool inspired by a "monkey and bananas" analogy. The tool converts a 5-point Likert scale into a tangible, fabric-based tool where children work together to "feed" monkeys to indicate their levels of engagement and satisfaction. We carried out a pilot study involving 32 children divided into six groups, utilizing a parallel triangulation method that integrated children’s self-reported information from the Ape-raisal with a systematic researcher observation framework. Our results indicate a connection between the concrete reports (Mean = 4.06, Median = 5) and the visible behavioral signs of high engagement and usability. These findings indicate that tangible and cooperative tools can successfully enable young children to participate as co-designers, offering trustworthy feedback in a group-oriented setting.

We report on the initial design steps of an audio-visual installation to be set up in a hospital guest house for children and their caregivers. The goal of the project is twofold: on one hand we aim to design a playful experience which can support children physical activity and their communication skills. On the other, we intend to develop an automated tool to assess a few basic qualities of child-caregiver interaction by interpreting users’ upper-body motion. We focus on the early stages of the project, situating it in the context of a collaboration between two institutions: an HCI lab and a paediatric hospital. We describe our efforts for the identification of a suitable dyadic activity to be first analysed using motion capture techniques and later augmented with audio-visual feedback. We also outline the strategies identified for the evaluation of the automated measurements of embodied child-caregiver interactions. Finally, we present two basic prototypes developed to stimulate a hands-on debate within our research team on the project’s design challenges and outcomes.

Technology is increasingly widespread in schools, but it does not always find an application that fits the needs of teachers and students. A reason for that is that stakeholders are often not sufficiently involved in the design process. This paper focuses on multisensory technologies for education and on the initial stages of a design process that involved teachers and researchers with background including computer engineering, cognitive science, and digital humanities. We asked teachers to participate in brainstorming and iterative design sessions aimed at designing educational activities for kindergarten and primary school children. These include activities for a more active attitude of children during roll call, for understanding circularity of time as well as for learning mathematical topics. Questionnaires and structured interviews were used for an initial evaluation. Results are encouraging and the next step will consist in developing the mock-ups realized into applications for use and evaluation in the classroom.

This paper describes a video surveillance system aimed at the automatic identification of events of interest, especially of abandoned and stolen objects in a guarded indoor environment. In particular the implemented system combines three phases of data processing: object extraction, object recognition and tracking, and decision about actions. Extracted objects are classified as "human" or "non-human" and static or dynamic, an event of interest following from a split between a "human" and a static "non-human" object, finally static "nonhuman" is analyzed to discriminate between abandoned or stolen object.

In this paper, a surveillance system able at detecting abandoned objects automatically is proposed. In particular the implemented system aims at detecting the presence of abandoned objects or in a guarded indoor environment and at tracking the owner while he is in the scene and advise if another person take the abandoned object instead of the owner.