Methods that support children’s participation in the design of digital technologies are central to Child-Computer Interaction (CCI), yet most accounts are situated in adult-led institutional contexts. Far fewer methods address participation within informal free time settings, where play is self-directed, relational, and sensitive to adult intervention. This paper presents PlayScape, a participatory design method developed to support child-led participation in nature-play contexts during children’s free time. Derived from action research with 15 children (7-11 years) in neighbourhood nature-play settings, PlayScape integrates theory from Environmental Psychology with approaches from Participatory Design and Design Anthropology detailing how relational activities, the least-adult role, and place-based co-learning and imagining can be applied to preserve children’s agency and play rhythm through design. PlayScape contributes to CCI by offering methodological guidance for participatory work in informal play settings, demonstrating how emplaced, child-led participation can enable children to envision digital possibilities grounded in their everyday play practices.

Early mathematical activities often combine symbolic representations of numbers with physical manipulatives (e.g., numicons, dice, cards) that help children represent quantities. However, children with mathematical difficulties often struggle to relate abstract representations (number symbols) to their physical counterparts (manipulatives). In close collaboration with mathematics education experts, we explored how Augmented Reality (AR) can complement existing educational materials rather than replace them. We designed an AR system that augments existing exercises and conducted a pilot study with 10 children solving addition tasks. Our observations suggest that children enjoyed and successfully used the AR augmentations to complete the tasks. However, the AR system also created undesired side-effect such as an overreliance on the virtual augmentations. We discuss design implications for how AR systems can better complement established educational materials and support the learning of calculation-based arithmetic strategies.

Dyscalculia is a specific learning difficulty that affects the ability to understand and work with numbers, often requiring specialized support strategies to develop foundational math skills. The exercises within these support strategies aim to reduce cognitive load by engaging multiple modalities—such as physically experiencing, verbally reasoning, and visually illustrating mathematical concepts. However, most current exercises are paper-based or de- livered through apps detached from the physical world, even when incorporating real-world elements like finger counting or handling currency. This work-in-progress explores how Augmented Reality (AR) can enhance these support strategies by embedding them in dynamic and interactive physical environments. We present a technical design exploration featuring three prototype applications that support students with dyscalculia (grades 1–9) through embodied and situated mathematical training. Our contribution is an early investigation into how AR can reimagine educational strategies by integrating physical manipulatives with virtual augmentation, creating more engaging math experiences for children with dyscalculia.

Figure 1: Various game-based activities in two different special education classes.A & B: 4th graders sketching themselves playing their favorite game.C: Brainstorming games in 6th grade.D: 4th graders playing a physical math game.

Recent HCI research emphasizes the importance of considering children's care ecosystems in the design of systems that support their well-being, including not only family, but also extended support networks, such as teachers and therapists.While this approach offers opportunities for care and collaboration, it also introduces challenges such as recruitment, appropriate methods, power dynamics, navigating diverse perspectives, and ethical considerations.This workshop 1 seeks to bring together IDC researchers and practitioners to discuss opportunities, challenges, methods, and tools towards a research agenda for designing technologies for and with children and their care ecosystems.It also aims to foster collaboration and strengthen the community by facilitating networking among researchers towards conducting multi-stakeholder research.

In this paper, we present the results from a systematic literature review on technology-mediated collaboration among children with special educational needs.The review is based on searches in four databases and focuses specifically on definitions and measurements for collaboration between children mediated by digital technology.Although collaboration is often vaguely defined in the reviewed literature, the paper contributes with an overview of various definitions, measurements, and common references, which together with recommendations for future work can be helpful when designing technologies for collaboration among children with special educational needs.

In this paper, we report on the first pilot of a concept called Cultural Game Jams. This specific form of game jam draws on tangible (artworks) and intangible (values) cultural heritage as material for game design. The aim of the cultural game jam is to scaffold young people transitioning from consumers to creators of games, aware of cultural and societal challenges and values. The concept has so far been tested with high school students and indicate promising results for future work.

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.

Inspired by the use of design-based research (DBR) in the learning sciences, in this paper, we discuss the promise of applying DBR in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI). As much research in CCI is related to learning interventions and educational contexts, we believe that DBR can be highly relevant for CCI, but that it has not yet reached its full potential in the field. We argue that DBR as a research approach can help mature the field, by explicitly grounding research design and interventions in theory, foster better impact beyond project completion, and bridge theory and practice through clarified knowledge contributions. Grounded in the characteristics of DBR, and based on a scoping review, this paper provides a timely snapshot of DBR literature, practices and research contributions in CCI research. Based on this, we will discuss further implications and opportunities of DBR in the CCI field.

In this workshop, we invite researchers, practitioners and designers to reflect on ethical issues arising from Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research with children. As participatory design research practices require rethinking and innovative adaptation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed, asynchronous and online (D)PD approaches may provide solutions to participation barriers. However, in light of this adaptation, additional ethical complexities may arise. Ongoing collaborative discussion is required to identify and address the different types of ethical issues which may arise when planning and conducting DPD projects with children. This workshop builds on previous workshops held at IDC 2021 and 2020, which provided insights into developing a protocol for a world-wide DPD project with children.

In this paper, we outline a Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research protocol. The protocol is presented through the lens of the World’s Largest DPD Project with children, a hypothetical project in which children address the issue of climate change. The DPD research protocol is based on the protocol template recommended by WHO’s Research Ethics Review Committee (ERC) and on the data from two conference workshops with a total of 45 participants. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) an initial version of a generic DPD research protocol; 2) an exemplification of how to appropriate this protocol for a specific project. We expect this protocol will be iteratively refined and will serve as inspiration for future research practices in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI).

In this paper, we explore the role of learning theory in the Child-computer interaction (CCI) community’s leading venues: the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference and the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (IJCCI). Searching all publications in the IDC conference proceedings and IJCCI, 63 papers that use the word stem ‘learn*’ in title, abstract and keywords were included in the corpus. Based on an analysis of these papers, our semi-systematic literature review demonstrates that assessment of learning regarding transfer of learning and controlled groups is rare, that the main role for learning theory is application, and that four main theoretical positions on learning can be recognized: constructivism, constructionism, cognitive theories, and socio-cognitive theory. The paper further presents an overview of how and which learning theories are used, and outlines paths for future CCI research based on the results.

In this paper, we map out the CoCe design space - a design space for co-located collaborative games that use multi-display composition. The design space grew out of the analysis of game instances based on the 4in1 concept. First, we did a horizontal analysis of 16 game instances with 31 corresponding gameplay design patterns (GDP), followed by a vertical analysis of 89 GDPs occurring in the description of the GDP Cooperation. Through inductive analysis, we have identified four perspectives with corresponding dimensions that span the CoCe design space. By applying the CoCe design space with game instances, we illustrate how it can be used both as an analytic tool for analysis of games and also as a generative tool in the design or re-design of cooperative games that use multi-display composition.

In this paper, we explore applying learning goals in participatory design (PD) practice as an approach to mutual learning in a school context. The paper is based on experiences from master students in interaction design, who were instructed to define learning goals for children participating in PD activities that they organized in a school context. Based on the results of this study, we suggest a number of strategies for aligning and applying learning goals in PD in school contexts in practice: Debrief the results from the children’s reflections with the teachers, Scalability in regard to time and context, Adjust to age, Collaborate with the teacher to define specific learning goals, Formulate learning gains for the teachers, and Develop support materials.

In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners as participants in co-designing the protocol for the world’s largest Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) project with children. Participatory Design – whose inclusive benefits are broadly recognised in design – can be very challenging, especially when involving children. The current COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to further barriers to PD with such groups. Recent key barriers include social distancing and government-imposed social restrictions due to the additional health risks to vulnerable children and their families. This disrupts traditional in-person PD (which involves close socio-emotional and often physical collaboration between participants and researchers). However, alongside such barriers, we have identified opportunities for new and augmented approaches to PD across distributed geographies, backgrounds, ages and abilities. We invite the CCI community to examine Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) as a solution for overcoming these new barriers, during and after COVID-19. Together, we offer new ways to think about DPD, and unpick some of its ambiguities. This workshop builds on work conducted in a similar workshop in IDC 2020, and this year will focus on the planning and design of the protocol for the world’s largest DPD project with children.

In this pictorial, we investigate how a virtual collection can put down its roots in a physical space and integrate into the local community. We present PLACED, a place-centric digital service that supports participation and community-production of knowledge in library events. We illustrate how PLACED has been deployed and used at a local public library over a six-month period. We examine the community-produced virtual collection that grew out of this library event with a focus on its placeness.

Recent years have seen growing interest in 'ethics' within the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community. In this paper, we take stock of 18 years of CCI research by conducting a systematic literature study exploring how and to what extent ethics has been dealt with in the community's leading venues: the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference and the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI). Searching all papers in the IDC conference proceedings and IJCCI, 157 papers were found that use the word stem 'ethic*'. Based on our analysis of these papers, our study demonstrates that while ethics is frequently mentioned, the literature remains underdeveloped in a number of areas including definition and theoretical basis, the reporting of formal ethical approval procedures, and the extent to which design and participation ethics is dealt with. Based on our study we provide five avenues of future research in the interests of developing a more explicit discourse on ethics in CCI.

This paper presents a systematic literature review on collaborative technologies for children with special needs in ACM Digital Library. The aim of the review is to (1) reveal the current state of the art, (2) identify the types of technologies and contexts of use, the demographics and special needs of the target group, and the methodological approaches and theoretical groundings, and (3) define a future research agenda. The results of the systematic literature review show that collaborative technologies for children with special needs are increasingly gaining attention, mostly involve tangible and/or embodied interaction, and are often developed for use in the classroom. The target group that is most represented are boys between 6 to 12 years with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The results further show a wide range of evaluation criteria for measuring collaboration, an interchanging use of theoretical concepts and a lack of definitions for the concept collaboration, and a need for more demographically diverse studies.

We investigate how to design community technologies for public events. We do so with a focus on technologies that give rise to new forms of participation and knowledge co-production in public libraries. Specifically, we deployed a digital service at a major public library during its four-week creative workshop series. The system offered an alternative way for people to work together as a community, to go beyond achieving individual goals, and to contribute to the achievement of public goals (e.g., building community bookshelves). We report on how the system has reconfigured physical spaces and afforded new social practices in the library. We propose Computational Alternatives as a fruitful approach for gaining situated, nuanced insights into a technology's possible adoption. We offer key insights in the form of computational alternatives vignettes -- grounded stories that encapsulate sociotechnical implications of technology, pointing to plausible alternative futures.

Despite its inherent challenges, participatory design (PD) has unique benefits when designing technology for children, especially children with special needs. Researchers have developed a multitude of PD approaches to accommodate specific populations. However, a lack of understanding of the appropriateness of existing approaches across contexts presents a challenge for PD researchers. This workshop will provide an opportunity for PD researchers to exchange and reflect on their experiences of designing with children with special needs. We aim to identify, synthesize and collate PD best practices across contexts and participant groups.

In this paper, we discuss the applicability of using design patterns to enhance the participation of children in the design process. This is illustrated by a study in which gameplay design patterns have been used to evaluate and re-design a collaborative co-located game focused on training collaboration skills in a special education context. The results show that patterns helped as a way of focusing the analysis of observations, as tools for noting suggestions for change, supported the children's involvement in co-design activities, worked as an extendable collection of intermediate-level knowledge elements, and that patterns functioned as a way to introduce a common vocabulary. The contribution of this paper is a number of opportunities and challenges for working with gameplay design patterns with children.

This paper explores teachers' expected and perceived gains from classroom participation in design projects. The results indicate that teachers hope the experience will be fun for the children, and that it will increase both children's and their own knowledge about technology. Although they consider learning goals important, these do not necessarily have to be communicated to the children, since the teachers experience that the children are learning several skills anyway. However, early involvement in the definition of learning goals could make participation more beneficial. The teachers also see several gains from partication for themselves, especially related to using a design approach in the classroom. We discuss the implications of these finding and suggest a way to increase the user gains for both children and teachers by considering the opportunity to use classroom participation as a way to support teachers' competence development, thereby fulfilling the promise of mutual learning as advocated in Participatory Design.

In this workshop, we invite researchers to jointly explore how the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field can establish intermediate-level knowledge, being a kind of design knowledge that resides in the realm between the design of particular artifacts and theories. In this full day workshop we want to invite (1) researchers and designers who position themselves as producing intermediate-level knowledge (2) people in the field of design research who have not necessarily thought about their work as producing intermediate-level knowledge. Together we will discuss the pros and cons of different kinds of intermediate-level knowledge and how we can promote the creation of these kinds of knowledge in the CCI field.

In this paper, we discuss possibilities for how digital tools can support children with intellectual disabilities to carry out leisure activities. Leisure activities play an important role for physiological and psychological well-being, but children with intellectual disabilities carry out less leisure activities than others. In order to investigate what factors are important for supporting children with intellectual disabilities to carry out leisure activities, we have developed a mobile application, Plan&Do, acting as a technology probe. The contribution of this paper is based on results from a situated evaluation, and consist of a raised awareness of the many challenges parents and children face when choosing and preparing for taking part in a leisure activity, as well as early results from how this can be supported, and directions for future work.

In this paper, we present the forced collaborative interaction game StringForce. StringForce is developed for a special education context to support training of collaboration skills, using readily available technologies and avoiding the creation of a "mobile bubble". In order to play StringForce two or four physically collocated tablets are required. These tablets are connected to form one large shared game area. The game can only be played by collaborating. StringForce extends previous work, both technologically and regarding social-emotional training. We believe StringForce to be an interesting demo for the IDC community, as it intertwines several relevant research fields, such as mobile interaction and collaborative gaming in the special education context.

Based on an analysis of all papers at IDC from 2003 to 2016 this paper urges the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field to start formulating intermediate-level knowledge, in the form of e.g. strong concepts. Our analysis showed that 40% of all papers at the Interaction Design and Children conference presents the design of an artefact accompanied by an evaluation (to which we will refer as 'artefact-centered' papers). While exploring the design space in the form of artefacts is important and valuable, it can be argued that those artefact-centered papers generally make a smaller contribution to the field as a whole, which is also visible in the number of citations to such papers in comparison to the number of citations to other kinds of papers. As a first step towards more intermediate-level knowledge, we have thus attempted to formulate and ground three suggestions for strong concepts in CCI, namely Head-up gaming, Collective storytelling and Remote sensing. We based these concepts on an analysis of a set of relatively often-cited artefact-centered papers from the IDC conference proceedings. The three strong concepts we present here aim to show that the artefact-centered papers presented at the IDC conference over the last 15 years potentially contain useful knowledge that should be capitalized upon. The contribution of this paper is to initiate a discussion in the CCI community on the need for intermediate-level knowledge and how this knowledge, such as strong concepts, should be generated.

In this paper we examine the challenges of introducing learning goals in Participatory Design (PD) activities in a school context. In order to increase the transparency of mutual learning in accordance with traditional PD values, we argue that learning through design approaches can inspire us to actively formulate learning goals, stage activities and include reflection as an integral part in the PD activity in order to meet those learning goals. We tested this approach in several master student projects, where the students were required to involve children in schools in the design of a technology. Our data analysis is based on their written reports as well as a specific exam question. We found that defining good learning goals was hard, but useful, especially when designing and discussing informed consent forms with teachers. Staging activities in order to meet the learning goals was possible, although learning goals were sometimes derived from the activities. Finally, incorporating moments of reflection for children was still difficult for our students because they felt pressed for time. We present some of the advantages and problems so that practitioners can consider the added value of this approach.

In this paper we propose the Role Definition Matrix that helps authors to describe more precisely the involvement of children in the design process. Although the previously defined roles for children (user, tester, informant, and design partner) have had a positive impact on researchers' and designers' awareness of the different ways to involve children in the design process, the Role Definition Matrix clarifies what was exactly done during a project, enables the reader to understand the credibility of the design decisions presented, avoids the misuse of certain terminology, and enables the consideration of trade-offs between the different roles. We propose to describe children's involvement in terms of the phases in design (Requirements, Design and Evaluation) and activity in relation to designer (Indirect, Feedback, Dialogue, Elaboration) during these phases. We present the Role Definition Matrix, including examples, and invite other researchers to use it as a tool to present their work.

This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of research papers on the involvement of developmentally diverse children in design. The review shows that there is a growing tendency to include developmentally diverse children in the design process. Compared to other groups of developmentally diverse children, children with high-functioning autism between 8 and 12 years old are the ones that are most often actively involved in the design process. Other groups of children often have a more passive role, being observed, both in the requirements, design and evaluation phase. Working with mixed groups of children, either children with different disabilities, or typically developing children together with developmentally diverse children, also occurs more seldom. Compared to design with typically developing children, adults are involved more intensively in the design, either as users, proxies, experts and/or facilitators. Specific guidelines for how to prepare and perform design sessions with developmentally diverse children often emphasize the need for a coherence of activities, a clear structure in the sessions, verbal as well as textual explanations, and the active participation of caregivers, teachers and therapists. Based on these findings we give several suggestions for further research.

In this paper, we describe the development and initial results of an interactive touch based questionnaire aiming to support self-reporting of the psychological health among children with intellectual disabilities (ID) aged 12-15. The questionnaire was developed in co-operation with pupils and teachers in special education and is tailored to assess psychological health, peer-relations, school- and family environment in youths with various disabilities. Preliminary results indicate that the application can be reliably completed by pupils without assistance from adults, independent of the youth's level of word comprehension and reading ability. The application allow for children with ID to self-report on psychological health, an essential first step in order to understand factors that contribute to variation in psychological health. This information can be the ground for designs that can change the everyday life for all children and youth with a chronic intellectual disability. The project is still ongoing, and the contribution of this paper is the lessons learned from developing a questionnaire that support self-reporting and assessment of psychological health in children with intellectual disabilities.

This paper proposes the principles of constructive alignment as foundation for course design within Interaction Design and Children (IDC). While the field has existed for over a decade, there is still no settled curriculum for teaching it. The paper demonstrates how intended learning outcomes in combination with related work and research on teaching IDC can be used to develop a course in IDC, and exemplify this with a brief description of the development of a recently completed course. The contribution of this paper is to support anyone who intends to start teaching in this area, to stimulate discussion in the community, and contribute to an emerging curriculum for Interaction Design and Children.

This paper describes the aim and preliminary results obtained during the first year of the project: "DEVICE: DEsign for Vulnerable generatIons- Children and Elderly". The aim of the project is to develop new educational programs for students and professionals with a specific focus on design for vulnerable generations, mainly children and elderly. The paper, whose focus is on design for children, describes the methodology and the preliminary results of the state of the art and analysis undertaken within the project, which consists of a list of training needs and educational programs that will be developed and validated during the next project months.

In this paper, we present a case study of a participatory project that focuses on interaction in large-scale design, namely, the development of the new Urban Mediaspace Aarhus. This project, which has been under way for ten years, embodies a series of issues that arise when participatory design approaches are applied to large-scale, IT-oriented projects. At the same time, it highlights the issues public knowledge institutions face, when interactive technologies challenge their fundamental roles and practices; by extension, this case offers examples of how these challenges may be explored and addressed through IT-based participatory initiatives. We present a range of such activities carried out during the past ten years, and present the main lessons from the project, based on interviews with three key stakeholders. These lessons focus on how to make participation work in practice, how to align different paradigms of inquiry and practice in a project of this scale, and how to capture and anchor the insights from participatory events to inform the ongoing design process.

This paper investigates how interaction design installations can support families playing together in the context of public libraries. The interactive installation U.F.O. scope is presented as a mean to investigate how the library can support children and parents playing together. The idea of the installation is to stimulate the lust for families to explore the unknown together on unfamiliar ground, while also discovering the physical library and its different types of resources. The design and evaluation of the installation are discussed, and some general issues central for future design are outlined.

In this paper, we present a large-scale interactive book browsing installation for children's libraries called StorySurfer. The StorySurfer prototype is developed within the Interactive Children's Library project, which includes interests from within design, research, industry, and libraries. The objective of the project is to give room for and encourage the physical activities of children, while pursuing to connect these with the basic digital and analogue services of the library e.g. borrowing and handing in books, searching for information, and providing access to a rich variety of media.

Public spaces are changing from being ungoverned places for interaction to be more formalized, controlled, less interactive, and designed places aimed at fulfilling a purpose. Simultaneously, new personal mobile technology aims at providing private individual spaces in the public domain. In this paper we explore the implications of interacting in public space and how technology can be rethought to not only act as personal devices, but be the tool to reclaim the right and possibility to interact in public spaces. We introduce information exchange, social support and regulation as three central aspects for reclaiming public space. The PhotoSwapper application is presented as an example of a system designed to integrate pervasive technology in a public setting. The system is strongly inspired by the activities at a traditional market place. Based on the design of the application we discuss four design challenges when designing for public interaction.

In this paper a particular design method is propagated as a supplement to existing descriptive approaches to current practice studies especially suitable for gathering requirements for the design of children's technology. The Mission from Mars method was applied during the design of an electronic school bag (eBag). The three-hour collaborative session provides a first-hand insight into children's practice in a fun and intriguing way. The method is proposed as a supplement to existing descriptive design methods for interaction design and children.