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.

The Art and Craft of Capturing Children’s Experiences in IDC course focuses on evaluation studies with children and presents three graduated studies along with all their planning, tools and observations whilst also challenging attendees to go beyond each by applying a growth mindset to query what can be done better - in this way the craft of working with children is mapped out as a continuum in which skills develop in innovation, the use of tools, and in the products of research. At the same time, a set of provocations / top tips are given as art forms built from curated conversations with IDC influencers that both convey a simple message but also a deeper meaning - as is the nature of art. The course is therefore suitable for all levels, and for researchers and practitioners. It is a new course specifically designed for the IDC community but builds on similar courses that have been held at CHI.

How can we leverage taste expectations to create novel food-based experiences for children? Eating is an embodied process that engages multiple senses. Cross-sensory correspondences may offer educational and recreational opportunities to design interactive applications that encourage diversifying encounters with food. We present a study with 64 children (ages 10–11) who explored eight textured materials hidden inside mystery “food” boxes and reported both their expected tastes and willingness to eat. Our findings provide evidence of touch–taste cross-sensory correspondences in children – sweetness with weak-hard-brittle and strong-soft-brittle materials, and saltiness with a weak-soft brittle material – and how these mappings influenced children’s openness to unknown foods. These results provide empirical grounding for cross-sensory interaction design with children, demonstrating how texture could scaffold curiosity and learning. We outline design implications for cross-sensory food interfaces, non-edible public exhibits, and playful educational technologies that could broaden eating experiences and enable new forms of virtual food interaction.

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.

Abstract The notion of Calm Technology, which can move between our focal and peripheral attention, is a potentially valuable but underexplored concept in relation to smart connected toys. In this paper, we explored two interconnected research questions: (a) How can scaffolding support children in understanding Calm and designing for Calm connected toys? (b) To what extent can children contribute towards the design of novel connected toys that apply Calm Technology Principles? Building on UX practice and research we developed a participatory approach to working with children we call Design School, which gave children knowledge and experience of a design process. Additionally, we created design cards to use within the Design School, which scaffolded the inclusion of Calm technology design principles within children’s designs. The Design School workshops ran over four days in a U.K. school with 30 children aged 10–11 years, design outputs were analyzed to answer the research questions. From our experiences and analysis, we make four contributions: (a) the success of design cards as a tool to scaffold children in operationalizing unfamiliar design principles, (b) an understanding of how different design activities afforded expression of Calm in design ideas, and (c) the Design School workshop format, which proved effective in enabling children to engage in design activities.

Figure 1: Infant 'babbling' in order to produce coloured shapes within the BabblePlay App

Children's screen use draws much attention from the media with the general narrative being that something needs to be done.In the IDC community, and beyond, many interventions and innovations are proposed and studies are carried out and report positive effects in many cases.One omission is in studies that report the first hand experience of children, another is in designing for children to take more control over their own screen use by managing their feelings and emotions and self regulating.In this work in progress paper we describe a small study that explored children's emotions as they exited from a game.The contribution here is the method that we present as being easy to manage, fun to operate and reliable in its outcomes.We describe the work and suggest some further uses and extensions.

Metaphors improve communication between children and adults, which can be challenging due to differences in experiences. Cross-sensory metaphors convey qualities associated with one sense using terms from another, e.g. a “sharp smell'' and could thus improve generational communication by bridging differences in sensory cognition. We observed children (8-11yrs, n=65), young adults (18-24yrs, n=51) and older adults (60-85yrs, n=38) playing Sense-O-Nary, a variation of Pictionary where players construct and interpret cross-sensory metaphors, and analysed differences in metaphor type, degree of elaboration, and association strategies. We found that children relied on ``familiar experiences'' for metaphor construction, while adults used more diverse association strategies. Degree of elaboration was consistent across ages for tactile and visual stimuli but differed for olfactory stimuli. All groups used ``active'' metaphors most commonly, but children showed more use of ``implicit'', ``similes'', and ``personification''. We present designs that demonstrate how these characterisations could be leveraged to improve intergenerational communication.

Following a review of papers in the ACM DL on ethics and children, this paper shows the growth of interest in this area, summarises the literature found, and then, using detail from 26 papers that offer practical advice, distils a Child Centred Ethics Framework that maps literature onto ethical concerns in relation to the practical application of ethics with children. The framework offers questions and solutions for researchers from the first inception of a project to the dissemination of the results back to the children. The framework is offered as an adjunct to an ethics / IRB document in that it places the child’s experience at the centre of decision-making allowing fuller exploration of aspects like assent, anonymity, inclusion and contribution. As a practical resource that researchers can use, the framework is presented as a living document waiting to be owned by the community.

Abstract This study highlights a value-led investigation into children’s (aged 9–18) views on decolonising museum experiences. The paper presents the challenges and opportunities associated with using a low-fidelity Augmented Reality authoring tool (User Experience Values Framing) to personalise museum experiences. The tool captures children’s values by employing a Value Sensitive Design approach, in addressing issues of representation, power imbalances, and cultural responsiveness in museum technologies. Through four empirical studies, the research examines the motivations behind visiting museums, value preferences, and the emergence of values amongst children. It sheds light on the effectiveness of involving children in the design process of an Augmented Reality authoring tool, highlighting their perspectives on decolonisation narratives and the desire for personalised and inclusive museum experiences. The studies highlight the importance of capturing and integrating values related to decolonisation into museum exhibition design, emphasising the needs and preferences of young audiences. Despite limitations, the insights gained offer valuable guidance for museums seeking to create more inclusive and equitable cultural exhibitions.

This work in progress builds on the work on ‘Small CCI’ working with children below the age of 5. The purpose of this study was to compare children's engagement and experience with three classroom activities over a three-week period. Eight children aged three and four years old took part in each activity (learning on tablet devices, free play in the home corner, and story time with their teacher) each week and were asked to complete a pre and post-test Smileyometer to rate each activity for fun, followed by a ‘This or That’ at the end of each session. The children's engagement was also measured by the research team using the Leuven scale. The results indicate that children of this age range can complete these evaluation tools. The children indicated that for all weeks they found the learning on the tablet devices the most fun and every child ranked the tablet activity as the best each week using the ‘This or That’ method. The researchers marked engagement the highest on the tablet devices for two of the three weeks. We note these results as unsurprising but suggest that they help us to understand the power of digital when considered in such settings and propose that researchers need to adjust for this when evaluating digital products with children of this age.

Monetization is fundamental to “free-to-play” mobile games, typically in the form of advertising placed within gameplay. Monetization within digital games is linked to deceptive design, and other ethically dubious practices such as loot-boxes. However, it is unclear what impact monetization has on the overall player experience. This research measured the experience and player performance in an experimental “Pong”-style game in three conditions: no advertising, static-interstitial advertising, and video-advertising. A between-subjects study was carried out with 95 participants aged 9-11 years playing the game in one of the three conditions, then completing the FunQ questionnaire. Results showed that while the static-interstitial advertising condition had a negative impact on player experience and player performance the video-advertising condition did not. Findings were ‘reported back’ to a group of the original child participants, feedback gathered during this session showed that children understood the findings and were able to contribute both additional insights and ideas for future research.

In a ten-week project with nine school classes across the North West of England we explored ocean health with IT-enabled solutions. We describe the activities carried out under headings of participation, learning, and design. Participation activities, which included recruitment, focused on setting the parameters for children’s inclusion and ensuring they understood how data might be used, and that handing in artefacts to the research team was their choice. Learning happened in an environment of contextual relevance that enabled children to develop data literacy whilst we could explore relevant research questions. Design was a journey from individual to whole-class design, while developing engineering thinking and social cohesion. We reflect on the journey showing that children learned from the activities and acquired a new enthusiasm for their local coastline. We reflect on how our inclusive approach can broaden HCI research to wider communities of children and encourage others to apply our model.

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses.

This paper introduces a novel approach in the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field that examines how children’s feedback on experimental stimuli can enhance research design, using emotion research as a case study. Our study utilizes interactive vignettes where children act as ’emotion detectives’, providing insights into their emotional articulation, followed by elicited feedback on the stimuli and research process. This method refines emotional vocabulary elicitation techniques and empowers children by incorporating their perspectives into the experimental design. The core of this research lies in establishing a participatory framework for involving children as evaluators, thereby proposing changes within the realm of experimental methodologies. We hope that this could serve as a tool to researchers studying children using an experimental setup.

Two cross-lingual (Nepalese and English) letter exchanges took place between school children from Nepal and England, using Digipal; an Android chatting application. Digipal uses Google Translate to enable children to read and reply in their native language. In two studies we analysed the errors made and the effect of errors on children’s understanding and on the flow of conversation. We found that errors of input negatively affected translation, although this can be reduced through initial grammar cleaning. We highlight features of children’s text that cause errors in translation whilst showing how children worked with and around these errors. Errors sometimes added humour and contributed to continuing the conversations.

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) is predominantly studied with school aged children. Working with preschool children, generally unable to read or write, involves addressing many challenges around planning, recruitment, and interpretation of findings. There are few examples in the literature of the challenges faced when conducting evaluations of technology with preschool children and very few evaluations conducted for commercial software companies. Our case study paper describes a six-week, twelve session, evaluation study of a commercial app (Lingokids) with children aged three and four in two nursery (preschool / kindergarten) schools. We describe challenges we met and describe how we adapted our plans to fit the context. We show how we were able to explore engagement and learning without gathering any personal data. With our practical tips and reflections, we hope our work will encourage others to work with young children in ways that respect their limited ability to understand assent and participation.

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).

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ‘create’ scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

It is widely understood within the field of HCI that participation in research and design activities, especially by children, requires careful planning and execution. Whilst the HCI community, and related groups like IDC, have gone some way to ensure aspects such as the selection and participation of children in research and design work is considered carefully, there has not yet been careful consideration, or reporting, of how children get to find out what has happened to the research that they have contributed to. In this paper we describe how we worked with children in overseas contexts and actively reported back to them the outcomes from the work they contributed to. We describe how our desire to report back influenced the planning the analysis of the data to ensure the results could be packaged in a child friendly way. We offer a simple to use checklist for practitioners and researchers to follow and a challenge for the IDC community to incorporate planned or actual feedback into the reporting of studies.

Failures are not reported enough in the literature as the pressure of publishing successful stories has moved us away from considering that even unsuccessful stories can be equally relevant to increase knowledge in research. Analyzing failures can be a great learning opportunity for the community of researchers. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a research that investigated the challenges experienced when designing and running studies with children. The study began with a literature review which led to an inquiry focused on exploring failures within the Child-Computer Interaction community by interviewing 14 researchers. Interviews were analyzed in the vein of the thematic analysis approach. We deliver three themes (unpredictability, technology targeted at adults, children willing to achieve the goal), three action points (the context, the technology, and the activity) and a paradigm shift from “failures need to be hidden” to “failure is a learning opportunity”.

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.

There are many ways to look at the efficacy and value of the inclusion of children in design activities within HCI. Whilst the experience of participation can be highly beneficial for children, there is value, even if it is only to confirm the merit of the children's participation, in looking at the process of ideation and in considering to what extent children can ideate. Whilst design is by nature untethered, being able to capture and consider the diversity of design ideas across multiple design teams and to look at how such ideas are developed, can facilitate reflection and potentially improve practice. This work explores the diversity of ideas and the iterative development of ideas during the incremental design of a mobile game with 26 teen informants working in small groups over four design sessions. A method to visualize the evolution of ideas across design sessions is presented. Groups’ behaviors are mapped to three positions according to how conservative and how innovative the participants were. We explore the implications of our work for practitioners and researchers.

Child Computer Interaction is concerned with the research, design, and evaluation of interactive technologies for children. Whilst many aspects of general HCI can be applied into this field, there are important adaptations to be made when conducting work for and with children throughout all stages of the design cycle. This course explores the use of five evaluation methods that are presented in the recently launched CCI UX Playbook. The Fun Toolkit, Drawing Intervention, The MemoLine, RAiD and Ethics Toolkits are all described in the course and then will be applied in a hands-on activity. Included in the course will be methods for the analysis of data for research papers as well as cut price techniques for the use of the methods in industrial settings.

We explore the question of how child designers can provide design ideas for technology that might reduce the marginalisation that can be experienced by some of their peers. To do this, we introduce the idea of Expanded Proxy Design that moves beyond the notion of "proxies as people" in design, to guide methods for engaging children into thinking about design ideas for a group that exists at some distance from their own experience. We outline three case studies where we made use of such methods. First, we consider expanded proxies in the context of technology and newly immigrant children who are unable to speak in English. Second, we consider the case of designing technology for children with and without visual impairments. Finally, we consider designing playful experiences for children with different temperaments. We reflect on the extent to which this expanded notion of proxies can be used as a meaningful vehicle for overcoming marginalisation and exclusion when children with different abilities design for each other. And we suggest ways to characterise, develop and refine expanded proxy design methods in this broader sense.

The majority of mobile apps are free-to-play and so include a variety of forms of advertising and other mechanisms for monetization. These monetization mechanisms often have deceptive elements and closely resemble what designers know as Dark Patterns. In-app advertising and purchasing have been studied with adults but, to-date, younger users have received comparatively little consideration despite their increased susceptibility to manipulation. This paper addresses the gap in research by creating the ADD (App Dark Design) framework which brings together insights from practitioners, theory from existing related research, and the findings from a user study which gathered qualitative data from 39 girls aged 12-13 years. We also derive a set of emerging issues and identify future research questions. This work is the first of its kind to create a framework to support the critical consideration of the design of free-to-play apps. We have identified a set of problematic Dark Design aspects that young people across the world are encountering in their apps every day and we hope this paper will both raise awareness and stimulate further research work on this important topic.

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar events at previous conferences and aims to foster and strengthen the debate about ethical conduct and moral responsibilities in IDC. In this year's panel, we seek to broaden the discussion by collecting ethical concerns, issues or dilemmas from within the community to be discussed at the conference. To this end, we will issue an open call for input that will be publicised via the usual channels. The organisers then will synthesise the responses and facilitate the discussion and debate at the panel.

The Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Community has a long history of innovating methods and techniques for the design and evaluation of technologies for children. Many innovations have been reported in the academic literature but the uptake of methods by industry has been slow and the community has hitherto failed to seriously consider how best to develop, present and promote their methods beyond academia. The aim of the workshop is to weave together IDC researchers and IDC key personnel coming from the industry, with genuine interest in industry-academia collaboration, into a community interested in building a coherent, high-impact collaboration channel. The goal of the workshop is to encourage a critical discussion and debate about how IDC methods can be further adopted, modified or even extended by the IDC related industry. This workshop is expected to reinforce IDC industry-academia collaboration with an ultimate goal to increase understanding and develop a community of interest that is going to co-develop ideas and novel design approaches that can bring IDC methods closer to the industrial practice

We compared four audio-based radar metaphors for providing directional stimuli to users of AR headsets. The metaphors are clock face, compass, white noise, and scale. Each metaphor, or method, signals the movement of a virtual arm in a radar sweep. In a user study, statistically significant differences were observed for accuracy and response time. Beat-based methods (clock face, compass) elicited responses biased to the left of the stimulus location, and non-beat-based methods (white noise, scale) produced responses biased to the right of the stimulus location. The beat methods were more accurate than the non-beat methods. However, the non-beat methods elicited quicker responses. We also discuss how response accuracy varies along the radar sweep between methods. These observations contribute design insights for non-verbal, non-visual directional prompting.

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 explores the design of voice user interfaces for smart homes with teenagers. The work was motivated by two research questions: How can we co-design voice interfaces with teenagers? and What ideas and expectations do teenagers have in relation to voice interfaces in a smart home? A design process was used which involved the participants initially scripting exchanges with a smart home on paper then prototyping at a higher level of fidelity using a tablet app with speech output. The study was carried out in a high school in the UK with 55 pupils in Year 10 (14--15 years old). This work is the first of its kind to explore the co-design of VUIs with teenagers. The key contribution of this paper is the design method that was used which proved successful and gave insights into the use of dual prototyping fidelities and the impact of scaffolding on the designs produced. Other contributions include the themes which emerged from the designs and a set of four themes related to teenagers' expectation of smart homes. The wide range of findings reported in the paper also bring insights that are valuable to those wishing to design and develop VUIs with and for younger users.

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and persistent or emergent ethical challenges. As a starting point, this panel aims to focus on questions around the involvement of children in our research and we aim to hear from designers and researchers in this community with different backgrounds and perspectives to reflect the diversity of work being done and cultures in which they are conducted.

Doing research with children requires special attention to recruitment, fair inclusion, and methods. Drawing on over fifteen years of experience of working with children in HCI contexts, this practical course will give attendees essential knowledge to do safe, effective and ethically sound research with children. The course covers the whole research journey, from recruitment through to publication. The course is delivered in a two-hour session.

Tablet games are flooding the market and large numbers of these are designed for children. The expansion of quantity has not seen an associated expansion of quality. Studies of the usability of tablet games for children typically take place in laboratory settings and fail to understand the context of use. This paper describes a study of 'at home' use of tablet games with children and their families that sought to examine how such games were played and how parents managed such game play. The children who participated in the study had cognitive, sensory or physical needs and these multiple needs brought many difficulties to the surface for parents mediating tablet use. A thematic analysis using four codes was applied to bring findings from diaries and interviews. Challenges for general tablet game design have emerged around designing for family routines, designing for working together, and designing to scaffold children's understanding.

This work describes how a simple Android game was used to study password and username creation with children aged 7 and 8. Children answered questions, made a username and password, and then later used these to log in. The novelty is in the use of the approach as well as in the findings. The findings confirm earlier work in regards to password length, suggesting six characters as adequate, and provide preliminary evidence that most children use familiar items in password and especially username creation.

This workshop explores the many roles children can play in the design of technology for their own use. Much literature has reported on how children have been mainly playing co-designer roles. By looking closer it emerges that children have mostly been involved in the ideation phase of design. More rarely were they actively engaged in other design phases e.g. conducting Contextual Inquiry, elaborating User Data Analysis, producing Personas, preparing Sketches and Story Boards and crafting Low and High resolution Prototypes. When it comes to evaluation, children are still mostly considered as final users while only rarely are they invited to run heuristic evaluations or even to have a more active role during the process. We would like to invite all relevant stakeholders: researchers, teachers, parents, and of course children, to share their experiences. The purpose of the workshop is also to bring their open questions and requests for guidelines and suggestions as to when and how to involve children in the various process stages. We hope to produce good definitions of the many roles children can play as co-researchers as well as to explore the benefits each participant will get from engaging with the overall design experience.

We present the findings from a longitudinal study of iPad use in a Primary school classroom. While tablet devices have found their way into classroom environments, we still lack in-depth and long-term studies of how they integrate into everyday classroom activities. Our findings illustrate in-classroom tablet use and the broad range of learning activities in subjects such as maths, languages, social sciences, and even physical education. Our observations expand current models on teaching and learning supported by tablet technology. Our findings are child-centred, focusing on three different roles that tablets can play as part of learning activities: Friend, Functionary, and Facilitator. This new perspective on in-classroom tablet use can facilitate critical discussions around the integration and impact of these devices in the educational context, from a design and educational point of view.

This study develops a unified pedagogy for the design and evaluation of e-learning software for high-school Computer Science.In accordance with the pedagogy, prototype e-learning software was developed for use in student instruction and independent learning.The pedagogy was iteratively refined based on the evaluation of teachers and education experts and the resulting e-learning software was developed considering student feedback.The problem domain focuses on the UK's recent shift in educational emphasis towards Computer Science GCSEs; however, the findings are broadly transferable to other developed nations.The pedagogy synthesizes the following learning theories: Constructivism, Social Constructivism, Connectivism, Cognitive Load, ARCS and VARK learning styles, these were in turn distilled into 31 heuristics.The research is broken into three phases, the first two phases are discussed in this paper; Phase 1 is the Initial Pedagogical Strategy and Prototype, Phase 2 is the Elaboration via Action Research.The synthesis of a unified pedagogy for the design and evaluation of e-learning software for high-school computing

There is growing interest in maker technologies around how they can be included in school curriculums to engage children with science subjects and about their use to explore new creative possibilities. Given that maker technologies are currently unfamiliar to most children across the world this work sought to use these technologies to investigate whether technology experience has an influence on design within a making context. A study was carried out with 29 participants aged 8-9 that involved a design task and a scaffolded making task based around a physical game using Arduino. Half of the participants completed the making task first then the design task, the other half completed the design task first then the making task. The design ideas created were then coded on 5-point scales for complexity of construction and novelty of concept, the coders also looked for evidence of transference from the making task to the design ideas. Results indicated that completing the making task prior to the design task increased the mean complexity of construction score. No clear evidence was found of elements from the making task being transferred into the design ideas. In addition to the specific findings about technology influence on design, the paper offers more general insights for those working within this space.

The participation of end-users in the design and evaluation of technologies has long been an important principle in human–computer interaction. This article reports a study to ascertain to what extent children using participatory methods could effectively design for a surrogate population. Fifty children, from a UK primary school, participated in a design activity to specify a serious game for children in Uganda. The children’s designs were analyzed and were shown to have effectively incorporated learning and gaming aspects. Based on these designs a serious game was developed. This new serious game and the commercial game Angry Birds were both evaluated for fun with 25 children in Uganda, using the Fun Toolkit and the This or That method. The results suggested that the children found both games fun, thus confirming that the children in the United Kingdom could effectively design a fun game for a surrogate population. Despite the positive results, the reliability of the evaluation methods is questioned. Inconsistencies were noted within the individual evaluation tools and the comparative results for some constructs yielded a low reliability score. We conclude that further research is required to establish suitable evaluation methods for evaluating fun with children in developing countries.

The last session at this year's conference is an interactive panel discussion facilitated by Prof. Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab. The closing panel consists of leading university and industry researchers with strong opinions about digital technology and its relation to children and childhood. The topic for this session is the general question for this year's conference: "How can interaction with digital creative tools support child development?" The panel reflects on theoretical frameworks and challenges for the design of new digital technologies for a new generation of children, discussing new trajectories to support children's learning, wellbeing, and sensemaking. Panelists draw upon ideas from the papers, demos, tutorials, and keynotes presented at the IDC 2014 conference. IDC delegates have the opportunity to join the conversation, posing their own questions and comments. The closing panel concludes IDC 2014 by sharing ideas on how we can build tomorrow's technology together.

Participatory Design (PD) in various guises is a popular approach with the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community. In studying it as a method very little work has considered the fundamentals of participation, namely how children choose to participate and how their ideas are included and represented. This paper highlights ethical concerns about PD with children within the context of information needed to consent. In helping children understand participation in PD, a central aspect is the necessity to help children understand how their design ideas are used which itself challenges researchers to seek a fair and equitable process that is describable and defensible. The TRAck (tracking, representing and acknowledging) Method, is described as an initial process that could meet this need. This is evaluated, in two forms, in a PD study with 84 children. The TRAck Method encouraged careful scrutiny of designs and allowed the researchers to distil useful design ideas although these were maybe not the most imaginative. There is a trade off between the limitations of applying such a process to PD against the benefits of ensuring fullinformed involvement of children.

There is growing emphasis on teenagers to adopt healthy behaviours and sustainable lifestyles. Innovative interventions delivered through pervasive technology or the internet are increasingly viewed as effective ways to motivate and help people change their behaviour. However, delivering interventions to change teenager's attitude or behaviour via pervasive systems need to be designed specifically for the target population. When working with teenagers relevant, teen-centric and appropriate activities need to be used. The aim of this workshop is to discuss and develop interdisciplinary research in the design of technology for behaviour change interventions in the teenage population.

Interaction design methodologies have become increasingly popular in the design and development of technologies for children with special needs. However, designing within this area remains fraught with difficulties. This workshop aims to explore the issues that occur when working with children with special needs and seeks to establish a set of guidelines for interaction design researchers who are working with such a diverse group. This will be achieved through the discussion of a number of themes that have highlighted as important when designing within this complicated area.

There have been a number of studies that have compared evaluation results from prototypes of different fidelities but very few of these are with children. This paper reports a comparative study of three prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity within the context of mobile games, using a between subject design with 37 participants aged 7 to 9. The children played a matching game on either an iPad, a paper prototype using screen shots of the actual game or a sketched version. Observational data was captured to establish the usability problems, and two tools from the Fun Toolkit were used to measure user experience. The results showed that there was little difference for user experience between the three prototypes and very few usability problems were unique to a specific prototype. The contribution of this paper is that children using low-fidelity prototypes can effectively evaluate games of this genre and style.

This paper presents a study aimed at better understanding how children categorize different games. The paper reports the results of an open card sort where participants were asked to categorize games from the Google Play Store (formerly the 'Android Marketplace'). The key contribution of the paper is that when compared with existing categories in the Google Play Store, children used categorization criteria much more aligned to the goals of the game rather than more abstract categories currently found in mobile phone application stores. The paper provides examples of existing categories that are not generally used by children and provides new examples of categorization criteria that are used by children to categorize existing games.

This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how to convey the idea of OUIs, how to facilitate the pupils to design OUIs and how to interpret the OUI design ideas. To convey the ideas of OUI, the Obstructed Theatre method, used in other studies with children and teenagers, was used. In this work, the salient features of the OUI conveyed in the theatre were: its malleability, its potential to bend and change shape, its association with the body and its novelty. To facilitate the design, three scenarios of increasing user interface complexity were conveyed in the theatre; and three different media (i) slime and pipe cleaners, (ii) PlayDoh and small Lego bricks, (iii) fabric and sticky shapes that afforded the creation of designs representing future organic interactive technologies were deployed. To enable the design team to make sense of the resulting designs, a Comic Strip approach was used to capture the changes in the designs as they demonstrated interaction. The paper explores this work from three perspectives; first, the effectiveness of the Obstructed Theatre approach to convey requirements of OUIs, secondly, the effectiveness of the three media used in the design sessions to encourage design solutions for OUIs and thirdly, the quality and relevance of the design ideas generated in the sessions and communicated to the design team using the Comic Strips and their applicability to other contexts. The paper concludes with some thoughts on methods and materials that could be used to encourage design ideas for OUIs and offers some of the participants more innovative ideas for the research and development community.

In this paper, we report the findings from a study investigating children's responses to technologies they have within their home by comparing them with the responses given by their parents.

This paper describes two studies that looked at passwords for children. The first examined what children knew about the creation of textual passwords and then a second, follow on study, investigated the passwords that children chose to use. The two studies show that children have some understanding of how to make a good textual password but that the passwords they use are often in contradiction to their own knowledge of best practice. Based on the findings from these two studies, the authors propose three key design principles for systems that require textual passwords for children and where no alternative is available.

The study compares self-reported computer experience (CE) obtained from children in computer-assisted and paper-and-pencil self-administered questionnaires. Twenty primary school children aged between 8 and 9 years completed a set of CE questions in both forms of administration in a Latin-square order. Findings show that young children can use both methods, and that they are able to answer a computer-based questionnaire just as consistently as a paper-based questionnaire.

In interaction design, there are several metrics used to gather user experience data. A common approach is to use surveys with the usual method being to ask users after they have experienced a product as to their opinion and satisfaction. This paper describes the use of the Smileyometer (a product from the Fun Toolkit) to test for user experience with children by asking for opinions in relation to expected as well as experienced fun.

Child Computer Interaction (CCI) is a relatively new area of interest and as such, it does not have a taught curriculum of its own. In addition, interest in CCI is relatively limited and so the demand for specialist courses in this area is limited. The author of this paper has designed several courses focused on and around CCI and has also implemented short courses in the subject. In designing these courses, there is a need to take decisions about what to include and what to leave out given the size of the area and the limitations of demand. This paper discusses the content of these several courses and discusses how and why decisions were made as to what to include. The paper concludes with a rubric for selection of material that might be useful for others in this field.

In this paper we describe three different design activities carried out for the design of a music device for children. The studies involved researchers from different disciplines as well as children from different schools. We reflected on what happened during the design activities and we looked at the outputs produced by the children in order to understand the feasibility of the activities from two perspectives: whether they contributed to the design of the product and whether they suitably involved children in the process. In relation to the design of the product, information gathered during the activities was associated either to the context or to the content of the design. In relation to the design method, the study enabled us to identify aspects of both children's' engagement and researchers' management that affected the success of the activities. We used these factors to create what we consider a useful framework for meaningful design activities.

This paper describes a tabletop prototype that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer to manipulative learning. After analyzing children's cognitive and psychomotorial skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on observations of the children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment with the prototype.

While standard icons often exist for common tasks, it can be difficult to design meaningful icons for non-standard tasks. Following a desire to build a music application that does not rely on text-based instructions, this paper explores suitable iconic representations for a 'record music' function on a mobile device. A study was carried out with primary school children (aged 8--10) to explore their current understanding of icons and elicit their requirements. It was seen that they were familiar with common icons, but that audio recording remains a difficult concept to represent through icons alone.

This paper investigates the use of drawings as a tool for the evaluation of children's interfaces. In the study, children's experiences on a variety of computer interfaces were captured in drawings. A group of four researchers participated in the coding of the drawings, before the results were aggregated and statistically analysed.

This paper describes the design and testing of a research Tangible User Interface (TUI) prototype for children. Some theoretical background is given on the evaluation methodology for children's products and designing TUI for children. The prototype is described and an exploratory initial study that investigated its usefulness is outlined. The authors found that the prototype went some way towards meeting the requirements but that it also needed some modifications for future use. The paper concludes with some reflections on the design of research prototypes and some recommendations for further studies in this area. The authors propose that a modified prototype can be used for evaluating the usability of a range of child-centered evaluation methods in future studies.

Journal Article A study of the usability of handwriting recognition for text entry by children Get access Janet C. Read Janet C. Read * Child Computer Interaction Group, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, UK * Tel.: +44 1727 893285; fax: +44 1772 894913. E-mail address:[email protected]://www.chici.org Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 19, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 57–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2006.08.009 Published: 24 October 2006 Article history Received: 21 July 2005 Revision received: 04 August 2006 Accepted: 06 August 2006 Published: 24 October 2006

The paper begins with a review of some of the current literature on the use of survey methods with children. It then presents four known concerns with using survey methods for opinion gathering and reflects on how these concerns may impact on studies in Child Computer Interaction. The paper then investigates the use of survey methods in Child Computer Interaction and investigates the Fun Toolkit. Three new research studies into the efficacy and usefulness of the tools are presented and these culminate in some guidelines for the future use of the Fun Toolkit. The authors then offer some more general guidelines for HCI researchers and developers intending to use survey methods in their studies with children. The paper closes with some thoughts about the use of survey methods in this interesting but complex area.

This paper describes how the design of a novel writing interface for children was informed by requirements gathering. The derivation of a set of system requirements from observations of children using early prototypes of the interface and from modelling the system is described, and then two methods of gathering further requirements by surveying children are outlined. The relative advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. The children were not able to contribute to the full range of requirements necessary for a complete system, but they contributed fun requirements that the observational work failed to identify. A model of the child's relationship to interactive systems is used to discuss why this is the case.

'Designing for usability' refers to the activity of incorporating research about how people use interactive interfaces into the design process. In our specific case, it refers to designers of children's products taking into consideration how the children use different software that they encounter.Many organizations that develop new interactive environments for children do not incorporate usability studies, or they do so without a good understanding of the complexity and consequences of these issues. The end results are websites and programs that children cannot use - and therefore will not use. In some cases many of the educational benefits and creative ideas developed are never utilized, because children do not pass the interface hurdle.The participating panel members have unique views about the role and value of usability studies on the design process. With an emphasis on the design of online environments, they will discuss their personal experiences of designing for usability, and will offer their understanding of the significance of usability in the design of interactive environments for kids.

When people use interactive technology, they construct a 'mental model' of the processes that are going on. This model assists the user in error repair and in task completion. The mental models that children have of computer systems are known to be brittle and incomplete. This paper describes how three different methods - structured interview, questionnaire, and talk back, were used with 7 and 8-year-old children to identify children's mental models of a handwriting-recognition based interface. The time taken by both the child and the researcher, the insights reported by the children, and the ease of use of each of the three methods is reported. The three methods are then compared, both in terms of cost/benefit and with relation to the influence of the researcher in the process. The paper concludes that the interview and questionnaire were both effective in this study, and that questionnaires can be surprisingly informative with children of this age.

This paper describes an experiment to establish whether or not children would accept a lower rate of accuracy for handwriting recognition than the 97% reported in a study with adult users. It outlines the experimental procedure that involved the use of an automated Wizard of Oz method. Problems with the experiment are described and the results are presented.