Stakeholder-informed prioritization (SIP) is a lightweight technique designed to help child-involved groups quickly understand and prioritize research and design directions. However, outcomes of short prioritization discussions can vary with group composition. In this paper, we deployed SIP with 34 groups of children and parents (N = 94) at a large community event, focusing on how group composition, including group type (family-based vs. child-based) and familiarity (mixed-familiarity vs. fully familiar), shapes SIP experiences. Results suggest that child-based groups were associated with higher satisfaction, more active child participation, smaller in-group range in comfort, satisfaction, and participation level, and more verbal reasoning. Fully familiar groups reported higher comfort and showed more verbal reasoning and less facilitator involvement, while mixed-familiarity groups showed a smaller in-group range in participation levels. We discuss implications for designing and facilitating child-involved group prioritization sessions and provide practical guidance for using SIP as a rapid method in early-stage research.

Children increasingly interact with generative AI systems that can produce hallucinated content, potentially reinforcing misconceptions and undermining critical thinking skills. We investigate how children detect and respond to hallucinations while building and testing LLM-powered chatbots in a development environment. We integrated hallucination-awareness scaffolds such as confidence indicators, fact-checking, repeated questioning, and model comparison. Through a study with 48 middle school learners aged 10-14, participants showed significant pre-to-post gains in AI knowledge, hallucination awareness, and confidence in building trustworthy chatbots. They developed multi-layered strategies, including probing inconsistencies and cross-checking with external sources. Key challenges included over-reliance on visible cues, fragmented use of scaffolds, and a tension between creativity and reliability. These findings highlight design implications for children’s AI literacy for responsible AI development: supporting proactive, iterative engagement in the development cycle, integrating scaffolds into coherent workflows, and balancing creativity with accuracy.

Teachers’ in-the-moment support is a limited resource in technology-supported classrooms, and teachers must decide whom to help and when during ongoing student work. However, less is known about how students’ prior help history (whether they were helped earlier) and their engagement states (e.g., idle, struggle) shape teachers’ decisions, and whether observed learning benefits associated with teacher help extend beyond the current class session. To address these questions, we first conducted interviews with nine K–12 mathematics teachers to identify candidate decision factors for teacher help. We then analyzed 1.4 million student–system interactions from 339 students across 14 classes in the MATHia intelligent tutoring system by linking teacher-logged help events with fine-grained engagement states. Mixed-effects models show that students who received help earlier were more likely to receive additional help later, even after accounting for current engagement state. Cross-lagged panel analyses further show that teacher help recurred across sessions, whereas idle behavior did not receive sustained attention over time. Finally, help coincided with immediate learning within sessions, but did not predict skill acquisition in later sessions, as estimated by additive factor modeling. These findings suggest that teacher help is “sticky” in that it recurs for previously supported students, while its measurable learning benefits in our data are largely session-bound. We discuss implications for designing real-time analytics that track attention coverage and highlight under-visited students to support a more equitable and effective allocation of teacher attention.

Families make key decisions about whether and how Virtual Reality (VR) enters children's lives, but their priorities rarely shape the research agendas and accountability structures that guide what is studied and built. We examine children's and families' views on (1) which knowledge is most needed to support decisions about children's home VR use, (2) which advances, tools, and content should be prioritized, and (3) which actors they see as responsible for addressing these priorities. We first conducted a secondary analysis of prior interviews with children and guardians to distill a structured set of family-perceived alternatives for home VR use. We then engaged 46 child-involved groups (84 children, 40 guardians) to collaboratively prioritize the perceived importance of these alternatives and assign responsibility to different actors. We found that families prioritized knowledge about VR's effects on brain development and behavior as the most needed, viewing it as the underlying mechanisms with downstream consequences for other effects. They treated safety monitoring as a prerequisite that should not depend solely on parental control, and ranked safety above affordability, comfort, and visual realism. This work contributes to the VR community by offering a children- and family-informed VR research agenda, along with insights into who families believe should be responsible for addressing these priorities.

As technology plays a growing role in children's lives, incorporating their perspectives is crucial for shaping future research and design.This paper introduces a lightweight technique, called Stakeholder-Informed Prioritization (SIP), designed to help childinvolved groups quickly get informed about and prioritize research and design directions.We demonstrate the use of SIP through a case study focused on Virtual Reality (VR), a technology that is rapidly gaining popularity among younger users but remains underexplored from their point of view.We piloted SIP with 34 groups of children (aged 8 to 18) and their families during a community event.Our results show that participants in these groups can successfully complete SIPs and are generally satisfied with the results.

Volumetric video (VV) offers photorealistic 3D capture for immersive educational VR, often created by instructors through live-streamed lessons or prerecorded demonstrations. While enhancing engagement and presence, such instructor-produced content can unintentionally expose sensitive objects, personal information, or biometric identifiers, and may intensify feelings of surveillance. This poster examines these privacy risks in using VV for educational VR and presents a research agenda focused on integrating diminished reality (DR) techniques and real-time 3D scene understanding into VV pipelines to dynamically sanitize environments while balancing realism and privacy.

Pair programming with AI often faces challenges in productive communication and engagement. Integrating embodiment offers a promising solution by making AI a more engaging and context-aware programming partner. To explore how embodied AI agent supports programming learning and affects user experiences, we designed a virtual reality (VR) programming environment with Wizard-of-Oz-controlled AI agents. Our study collected data from 18 participants through knowledge acquisition assessments and interviews. The results showed that embodiment improved engagement, enhanced communication efficiency, and offered emotional support. Specifically, the incorporation of embodied actions allows users to perceive the AI agent as a “programming partner” and introduces many interactions that resemble those shared with real-life partners. However, the effectiveness of embodied actions in supporting users with programming tasks depends on the timing and accuracy of those actions. This study reveals the potential of embodied AI agents in advancing programming education and provides valuable design insights for creating more intuitive and supportive AI programming partners.

HCI aspires to achieve equitable outcomes in our sociotechnical interventions. Prior work suggests that improved evaluation and reporting of intervention disparities can help achieve more equitable outcomes. We analyzed socioeconomic disparities in hybrid and online-only local support communities by quantitatively operationalizing the access-adoption-adherence-effectiveness (AAAE) framework. The hybrid intervention demonstrated statistically significant socioeconomic status (SES)-based disparities in adoption of community's asynchronous online platform, while the online-only intervention demonstrated statistically significant disparities in access and adherence to synchronous online classes. Our findings suggest that disparities in earlier elements of the framework ''pipeline'' may mask later disparities due to survivorship bias, highlighting the importance of comprehensively examining the four elements of the framework. Using the example of a parenting education community, we reflect on using the AAAE framework as a rigorous tool to evaluate a sociotechnical intervention's disparities, avoid survivorship bias, identify the most pertinent support needed, and aid efforts toward sustained and equitable outcomes.

Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology to revolutionize education, socialization, and entertainment. However, alongside its promising applications, concerns about potential risks, particularly for young children, have surfaced. We conducted a survey and interview study with 55 parents and 67 children aged 7-13, to identify ethical concerns and design considerations for VR usage in youth populations. This study contributes to the HCI community by providing empirical insights into the ethical concerns surrounding children’s VR usage, as viewed from both children’s and their parents’ perspectives. These insights stem directly from their perceptions of the risks, benefits, and considerations associated with VR across various usage scenarios. Additionally, our research offers valuable design and research implications for the development of responsible VR practices that balance the advantages and potential risks for children and their families.

Virtual reality (VR) offers promise in education given its immersive and socially engaging nature, but it can pose challenges for educators when creating VR-specific content. VR videos can function as a new educational tool for VR content creation due to their creation affordability and user-friendliness. However, little empirical research exists on how educators utilize VR videos and associated pedagogy in real classes. Our research employed a contextual inquiry, through in-person interviews and online surveys with 11 instructors to gain actionable insights from envisioned teaching scenarios for VR videos that are informed by actual instructional practices. Our study aims to understand the factors that motivate instructors’ adoption of VR videos, identify challenges educators face when incorporating VR videos into instructional units, and examine pedagogical adjustments when integrating VR videos into teaching. Through empirical evidence, we provide design implications for the development of VR-based learning experiences across diverse educational contexts. Our study also serves as a practical case of how VR can be adopted and integrated into education.

In order to cultivate children’s computational thinking, researchers have developed many excellent programming systems. Among them, the tangible programming systems combined with graphic output have been widely accepted because of the intuitive input method and diversified visual feedback. However, few of them support collaborative learning or programming. Little is known about children’s experiences, emotional states and behaviours on collaborative programming. Motivated by this gap, we present a novel tangible and collaborative enabled programming system named Lighters, which designed for children aged 7–10 and had two types of collaboration modes (block-based and role-based). We conducted an user experiment with 24 children, and collected physiological (EDA), questionnaire, video recording and interview data for analysis. Based on our experiment results, Lighters are effective in helping children learn to program collaboratively. In addition, Lighters can mobilize children’s positive emotions and enthusiasm to learn programming. Compared with block-based collaboration, role-based collaboration is more likely to stimulate children’s emotional states and has a better effect on learning programming.

Collaborative play not only provides entertainment but also nurtures connections and strengthens community ties. In family and intergenerational contexts, collaborative activities and play can engage family members in quality conversations and meaningful connections over distance. To explore participants' preferences, practices, and interaction dynamics when playing remotely, we conducted a design probe study with 15 groups of parents and children from 16 families. Our findings highlight both similarities and notable differences in the use of communication methods, workspaces, and objects between parents and children. Specifically, we observed distinct patterns in gestural and verbal communication and identified specific challenges encountered by children in a simulated remote setting. Our findings also revealed the dynamics of play sessions, particularly when co-located participants are involved, shedding light on the complexities of remote intergenerational communication and play. Our work contributes empirical insights into designing more effective and engaging remote collaborative platforms for families.

Prior work has explored various technology designs to support intergenerational communications and connections through remote activities such as reading or play. However, few works have explored these technologies outside the family settings. In this work, we aimed to understand how technology can support social connectedness through remote activities, by investigating the use of a tablet-based AR system among older adult volunteers and students for remote reading. We developed the system based on insights from previous research, deployed the system in the field, and observed the use of the system over six months. With the data collected from the field, we present a rich description on the use of the system and the practices that emerged around its usage in a real-world setting. Our findings highlight the importance of supporting an engaging reading experience and context understanding for social connections with the technology design. We provide insights into how such technology can support intergenerational communication and foster social connectedness.

Integrating music into Computer Science (CS) education can stimulate children’s creativity, change the stereotypical perspective of CS, and encourage women, ethnic or cultural minorities involved in the Computer Science area. In this paper, we use Augmented Reality (AR) technology to design a tangible programming system - AR-MPro for children, acting as a bridge between programming and music. It allows children to create customized AR effects to visualize music with low-cost materials by constructing tangible program sequences. AR-MPro is expected to broaden participation in computing, and be more intuitive, intriguing and instructional to enrich children’s creating and programming experiences.

Large age differences and geographic distance between siblings can often hinder the development of close relationships, as they may have different social circles and schedules. Younger siblings may also have limited access to digital technology, which can further complicate communication and interaction between them. In this paper, we developed two technology probes, Haptic Bubble and Emoji Board. Both of these systems utilize embodied interaction, which has been shown to be an effective way to engage children in remote communication. Our work focused on three main goals through the development and preliminary study: the system design goal involved testing the feasibility of the embodied design approach, the empirical goal was to collect information on how siblings use embodied communication technology and the design goal was to inspire new kinds of technology to support large gap siblings’ needs.

Virtual Reality (VR) has a noteworthy educational potential by providing immersive and collaborative environments. As an alternative but cost-effective way of delivering realistic environments in VR, using 360-degree videos in immersive VR (VR videos) received more attention. Although many studies reported positive learning experiences with VR videos, little is known about how collaborative learning performs on VR video viewing systems. In this study, we implemented two collaborative VR video viewing modes based on the way of group video control, synchronized or shared (Sync mode) and non-synchronized or individual (Non-sync mode) video control, against a conventional VR video viewing setting (Basic mode). We conducted a within-subject study (N = 54) in a lab-simulated remote learning environment. Our results show that collaborative VR video modes (Sync and Non-sync mode) improve users’ learning experiences and collaboration quality, especially with shared video control. Our findings provide directions for designing and employing collaborative VR video tools in online learning environments.

Siblings play a crucial and long-lasting role in family connections and relationships. However, with the older sibling transitioning out of their parental home, maintaining a close sibling relationship can be challenging, especially if siblings have a large age difference. We conducted a diary and interview study with nine families in China which have spaced siblings, to identify design opportunities for technology to better support their communication and connection needs. We contribute to the HCI community in three aspects. First, we contribute an empirical understanding of current communication patterns from distributed families with large age gap siblings in China. Second, we identify current facilitation roles, practices, and challenges regarding sibling relationships from different stakeholders’ perspectives. Last but not least, we present technological opportunities for supporting the large-gap sibling relationship, informing directions for future research and design for distributed families.

VR has received increased attention as an educational tool and many argue it is destined to influence educational practices, especially with the emergence of the Metaverse. Most prior research on educational VR reports on applications or systems designed for specified educational or training objectives. However, it is also crucial to understand current practices and attitudes across disciplines, having a holistic view to extend the body of knowledge in terms of VR adoption in an authentic setting. Taking a higher-level perception of people in different roles, we conducted a qualitative analysis based on 23 interviews with major stakeholders and a series of participatory design workshops with instructors and students. We identified the stakeholders who need to be considered for using VR in higher education, and highlighted the challenges and opportunities critical for VR current and potential practices in the university classroom. Finally, we discussed the design implications based on our findings. This study contributes a detailed description of current perceptions and considerations from a multi-stakeholder perspective, providing new empirical insights for designing novel VR and HCI technologies in higher education.

Examining the values inherent in papers published at IDC provides a lens to our research community and informs the path of future research needs and opportunities. We conducted a content analysis of the values expressed in all full IDC papers between 2011 and 2019 and a survey with the first authors of 20% of these papers. We examine the types of IDC research contributions, the qualities and behaviors the research seeks to support in children, the role of the child and other stakeholders in the design process, the theories that inform IDC research, and the criteria that guide the technical design choices. We discuss the research contributions and the core value trends over the past two decades of IDC full published papers. We also present the ethical considerations central to the surveyed authors' work. Based on our analysis, we discuss implications and opportunities for future contributions, such as explicit attention to inclusivity in research, encouraging multidisciplinary collaborations, and expanding the qualities our community aims to support in children. These qualities include: focusing on children's sense of autonomy, agency, and empowerment; and children's participation in research as active creators of technology.

In this paper we present ARCat, a tangible programming tool designed to help children learn Depth First Search (DFS) algorithm with augmented reality (AR) technology. With this tool, children could use tangible programming cards to control a search process, rather than control virtual characters directly. With the special design of card semantics and real-time feedback, the cognitive load of the learning process had been proved to be affordable to children (ages 8-9) with the result of our preliminary evaluation, which shows the possibility of basic algorithm education for young children with tangible interface.

Programming is an effective way to foster children's computational thinking. We present AR-Maze, which is a novel tangible programming tool using Augmented Reality (AR) technology for young children. AR-Maze superposes constant feedback on the physical world and maintains a positive, low-cost learning environment. Using this system, children could create their own programs by arranging programming blocks and debug or execute the code with a mobile device. In addition, they will be able to learn fundamental programming concepts, such as parameters, loop logic, debug, etc. We design and implement this system, as well as conduct a preliminary user study and analyze the results, which can guide a better design of AR-Maze. With this work, we intend to help children programming in an interesting and intuitive way.