Storytelling is vital for a child's development, yet many children hesitate to create their own stories due to lack of inspiration or interest. Existing technological tools are often too complex or require specialized equipment, posing further challenges to story creation and limiting creativity. Augmented Reality (AR), despite its potential remains under explored in digital storytelling. To address these difficulties, we developed a mobile AR application to support story creation. A user study carried out with a with a class of fourth-graders revealed that participants found the AR environment engaging, emphasizing the importance of agency, and artistic expression in storytelling. This research highlights AR's potential as an accessible and effective tool for digital storytelling, particularly in collaborative contexts.

Storytelling is an effective evidence-based practice as an accepted intervention by therapists for the therapy of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Digital storytelling, particularly using smart tangibles, offers a structured, interactive and engaging environment for children with ASD allowing for repetition, offering feedback with visual supports, and giving the child more authority over the learning experience.

In this pictorial, we describe a user study carried out with a group of 20 first graders (ages 6-7). The aim of the study was to investigate if it is possible to infer children's engagement with technology by looking at their drawings. The analyses of children's drawings was informed by the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) and the results evidence that children's drawings provided valuable insights, helping to understand children's engagement and involvement with the tool. Applying the GVD to inform the analytical process reduced subjective interpretations of children's drawings. As such, this work adds evidence to the body of knowledge that seeks to validate more reliable methods to assess children's opinion in user studies.

In this paper we describe and reflect upon the setup and outcomes of the Research and Design Competition at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference over the years. We frame it against similar initiatives and discuss its achievements so far while suggesting the steps that could increase its visibility and popularity both inside and outside of our academic community. In fact, we believe such an initiative is a great opportunity to state and declare the community’s core principles and values. This is done by having children as protagonists, and listening to and acknowledging their contributions. Reaching out to, inspiring, and rewarding the other adults in the loop, such as parents and teachers, is essential to ensure children’s participation and empowerment. Equally important is actively promoting diversity and inclusion to maintain a healthy and balanced community’s growth. Here, we review progress to date, outline plans for moving forward and establishing this initiative as a fun place for children to interact with new technology, as researchers and practitioners better understand their needs and expectations. Therefore, our primary contribution is a set of guidelines and best practices for it to develop, which is based on a thorough examination of the challenge so far.

We present M&M, a digitally enhanced narrative environment for children that resulted from the collaborative projects Monnom and Mobeybou. M&M aims at offering children open-ended interaction scenarios to collaboratively create narratives through their bodily movements, voices, and the use of physical objects in space. M&M consists of sensors that collect data from the physical environment, an operating system that transforms the collected data into digital visualisations, and a projection that displays the output of the narration. In the physical environment, children can use objects and move with them to interact with the digital narrative elements. By interacting with the story elements, children connect with different cultures and environments, in an intercultural embodied storytelling experience.

In this paper we explore children’s perception of technology by looking at the drawings and descriptive texts submitted to the Design and Research Challenge run for the International Conference on Interaction Design and Children 2022 by 166 children from US, Japan, Portugal and Switzerland aged 7 to 11 years old. We cluster and analyse drawings as a means to elicit the perception, understanding and expectations children have of the role technology can play in supporting connectedness, the theme of the conference. We report differences and similarities across countries, age and gender, as well as discuss the dichotomy between magic and realistic proposals, as it provides an important dimension of the CCI design space. Therefore, we start by looking at the use of drawings for better understanding children’s needs and wishes and move on to explore the children’s sense of technology, to finally reflect on its implications on design.

Under the umbrella of smart toys, a myriad of interactive systems have addressed a variety of scenarios considering entertainment, education, sustainability, social and environmental learning through play. Tangibles and small toy robots prevail; but interaction technology based on wearables, conversational interfaces or augmented reality may also be part of this landscape to implement smart toys that are both social and/or connected. In the second edition of this workshop, we set a special focus on challenges associated to opening smart toys to different degrees of ”connectedness”, and reflecting on concerns regarding data privacy and ethics when smart toys are reframed to function in a connected way. After the pandemic, social isolation forced us to change the way we interact with each other. We are convinced that smart technologies can open new avenues for promoting social connectedness enabling more interactive playing and learning activities.

Abstract We present and discuss the concept ‘narrating by doing’ as the process of creating narratives by performing different embodied actions with tangible interfaces for storytelling. We characterize it as a ‘bridging concept’ that can facilitate exchange between theory and design, informing research and design of TUIs for storytelling targeting young children. The concept builds on theories of cognition, learning and narration, specifically drawing upon the following perspectives: Constructionism, Socio-Constructivism, Embodied Cognition, Narratology and The Narrative Practice Hypothesis. Building upon these theoretical foundations, we identify and discuss four ‘design articulations’ (i.e. important parameters that express the qualities of the concept), namely communicative situation, narrative function of the tangible objects, collaborative and embodied actions and the narrator’s position. Finally, we add evidence to the concept and discuss its productiveness by presenting a set of considerations to inform the design of tangible interfaces for storytelling.

Here, we present the visual development of a digital manipulative that promotes creative storytelling among young children. The tool addresses multiculturalism, by presenting children with story elements from different cultures. We reflected on how to create visual elements that both represent a given culture and foster the children's imagination and creativity. It is key to create eye-catching and imagination-inducing visuals, that can be achieved through an exploratory and iterative process. It is crucial to undertake extensive research to learn about and understand the history and meanings behind each culture, to avoid stereotypes and other representation clichés. Whenever possible, it is important to involve people raised in each culture in the design process, since their contribution is grounded in real life experience and will translate into valuable insights.

This paper presents and discusses the preliminary findings of a research focusing on the design and use of Mobeybou, a digital manipulative aimed at promoting the collaborative creation of multicultural and cross-cultural stories among young children. We frame the research in the wider discussion of the 21st century skills and competencies, and present the digital manipulative as the product of a participatory design methodology. We discuss narratology, multiculturalism, embodiment and collaboration as the cornerstone ideas underpinning the design of Mobeybou. We also show how storytelling is envisioned as implying the creative use of the multicultural and multimodal information that is offered to users in the form of constraints and open-ended options. A pilot study, carried out with twelve 8-year-old children, has validated these design options and offered interesting insights for its further development. Here, we present the interface and discuss the feedback provided in the user study.

The design of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) has often involved children. Nowadays, the term co-creation is gaining momentum and extending the already established role of children as co-designers. In this sense children become creators of new personalized experiences not only during the design process but also when using the final interactive products. Such dynamic opens new possibilities reshaping the role and the development of tangibles by providing users "building blocks" for creative experimentations. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from relevant disciplines and expertise to reflect on the co-creation approach, and on the possibilities that it opens for the development of innovative tools that place the users in the center of the creative process. Contributions to this workshop may address diverse aspects related to co-creation from different perspectives. The ultimate aim of the workshop is to discuss the research challenges and the pedagogical issues that need to be addressed when designing TUIs for co-creation.

This paper presents the development of an augmented reality (AR) application for visualizing the five convex-regular polyhedrons, known as platonic solids. The application provides a virtual interactive environment for the visualization, construction, deconstruction and manipulation of these polyhedrons, allowing users to explore the properties of each platonic solid, e.g. faces, vertices and edges as well as the respective spatial constructions (in 3D) with or without animation. A pilot study showed that the students enjoyed using the application and considered it facilitated the study of the solids.

The Reader's Theatre (RT) is a pedagogical activity, in which the children read aloud to an audience. Prior research established that the RT can be used to foster reading fluency and ultimately to increase reading skills [11]. However, this activity still has the margin to grow its potential. One way to support and empower children in this pedagogical activity is by allowing them to collaboratively define digital media effects that can be triggered when the reading activity takes place. In this paper, we describe STREEN (Story Reading

In this paper, we present an ongoing project named STREEN (Story Reading Environmental Enrichment). The project explores a concept of augmented reading focusing on a smart environment that is able to automatically trigger digital media enrichments depending on the reading performance and the narrative. By creating an engaging and immersive reading experience, STREEN has the potential to support early readers. In order to understand how the story reading activities can be enriched through digital media, as well as the effect of such enrichments on the reading experience, the design and development of STREEN follows a Design Based Research approach, involving teachers and primary school children along the design process. In this paper, we describe the first steps towards the construction of a smart reading environment for primary school children.

We present Paper Ladder, a low-cost, light-weight, and paper-based variant of the Sticky Ladder rating scale to collect children's product preferences in user studies. This paper version revamps the original, effective but arguably impractical evaluation method by making it more accessible to researchers. In this paper, we show its potential with preliminary results from a pilot study, where 45 grade-2 children used a Paper Ladder to rate their preference for different types of correctness feedback in a math app. Results suggest that Paper Ladder could be an effective and valuable instrument for conducting user studies with young children.

This paper presents results of an exploratory study that examined the effects of different types of correctness feedback on children's actual and perceived performance with a math app. In the study, forty-flve grade-2 students solved easy, moderate, and hard drill questions with a math app augmented with textual, icon, and emoticon correctness feedback. Results suggested that, for the most part, neither the feedback type nor the difficulty level affect children's actual and perceived performance with the app.

We present a novel color-coded feedback method that highlights the types of corrections made by autocorrections. We then present results of a longitudinal user study with 7-8-year-old children that compared the new method with the conventional autocorrection feedback method, in terms of leaning new words and spelling. Results suggested that the new method better accommodates learning new words. Interestingly, learning was observed with the conventional feedback method as well, demanding further investigation into whether predictive methods are truly a barrier to learning new words and spelling.

This paper describes the reengineering t-words, a tangible interface that aims at promoting children's collaborative and playful exploration of the oral language. t-stories, the new version of the interface, is composed by 10 client modules and a server module; each module has a slot on the top surface for placing paper cards (that can be customized) and a surface for drawing on the bottom. t-stories allows recording and reproducing audio as well as drawing, or writing on its surface. Additionally it allows recording and playing audio based on NFC tags, which can be stuck to different surfaces or objects, and used in various scenarios, e.g., record a story on a tag and stick it to a drawing. Children can use the interface to carry a wide variety of language related activities, and choose how they want to hear them (e.g., specific sequences or the whole story). This paper describes the new implementation of the interface and presents an intervention that was carried at kindergarten with a group of 18 children, aged between five and six years old.

This workshop aims at stimulating children's oral language skills by involving them on playing and creating different language games or activities using the t-stories interface. The interface allows recording and playing audio on the t-stories' modules, as well as recording and playing based on identification with NFC tags that can be used as sticker on objects, paper, or other materials and placed in different locations. After the presentation of t-stories by the workshop facilitators, children will have the opportunity to explore the interface on their own, then they will be asked to participate in different language games, whereby they actively create their own content. Afterwards children will be challenged to imagine and create activities for their peers.

We present a mixed-reality interface, in which a carrousel-like platform carries a set of wooden figures from the physical world into a game running inside a tablet, bringing them back to the physical world again by further rotating the platform. The wooden figurines allow young children to manipulate and play with them, working at the same time as characters of a game. Along the interaction, users are confronted with different problem solving situations that they can solve with the help of the wooden characters.

In this paper, we present results of two user studies that compared the performance of touch-based and pen-based gesture input on capacitive touchscreens for both adult and 8-11 years old child users. Results showed that inputting gestures with pen was significantly faster and more accurate than touch for adult users. However, no significant effect of input method was observed on performance for child users. Similarly, user experience evaluation showed that a large number of adult users favoured one technique over the other and/or found a technique more comfortable to use than the other, while child users were mostly neutral. This trend, however, was not statistically significant.

It has been 20 years since Pierre Wellner published the article Interacting with paper on the digital desk [1] where he challenges us to imagine a space where "Instead of replacing paper with computers we could enhance paper with computation". Two decades after, we see the development of multiple projects that expand the expressive possibilities of traditional books by combining and crossing different media. Nevertheless the interest generated by those projects is limited, most of the time, to the research communities. The purpose of this IDC 2013 workshop is to bring together a community of researchers, publishers and authors to reflect and discuss the present and future impact of mixed media books.

This paper describes research on designing a tangible system for collaborative storytelling, which addresses preschool children. The first part of the work focused on creating a tangible interface, for children aged four to five years, proposing to create a playful experimental space where children can collaboratively engage in creating their own multimedia narratives. Further research proposes to carry a long term study with a group of 25 five preschoolers interacting with the developed tangible system, trying to investigate how physical interaction and collaboration might influence and shape cognitive and social processes in real classroom settings. We describe the design process, as well as the final system, and report findings from a first preliminary study.

This work presents an ongoing study of the design and development of a physical interface that addresses storytelling. The current prototype is the result of several design iterations with four to five years old preschoolers and six preschool teachers. The interaction model was motivated by findings from research on tangible user interfaces as well as embodied cognition. Although research in these areas has revealed potential benefits of the use of physical interfaces, until now no extended in depth study of a prolonged use in the classroom of such interfaces has been carried. This work proposes to carry such an investigation, observing a group of preschoolers interacting with the interface for a period of six months.

In this paper, we describe the design process and a first pilot study of t-books, a toolkit consisting of an electronic platform, a book with slots on it and a set of picture cards that children place on the book to interact and explore the narrative. t-books was motivated by the wish to offer children an environment where they can play with the language elements, while engaging as story authors. In this process children can enlarge their vocabulary, experiment different storylines and learn to create meaningful sequences that evolve to a narrative. At the same time children can build their own story world by choosing among a diversity of different characters, settings and actions according to their needs and preferences, thus generating a simulation environment within the story universe, where alternative scenarios, and what-if questions can be posed and tested. A first insight of children's interaction with t-books showed that children were highly motivated to create and share their own stories.

We have reached a special moment in the story of the book: today's youngest generation will experience literature in a vastly different way than the generation preceding. What we call a book has always morphed over time, but digital capabilities and the ubiquity of mobile electronics are changing the landscape at an unprecedented pace. This workshop will be a forum for creative exploration and discussion of the future of the book, motivated by this particular historical moment and a desire to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds who are working on book-related technologies. We will share and document visions, approaches, and techniques.