Extended reality (XR) technologies have become more advanced and affordable in recent years, leading to greater familiarity and adoption among US families and youth-serving institutions. While these tools show promise in enhancing children's education, healthcare, and recreation, ethical considerations around safety, accessibility, and impact—particularly for children from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—warrant further investigation. This study engaged 17 local, primarily Black, middle school male youth in evaluating and co-designing utopian and dystopian XR use cases to surface their ethical perspectives. We found that our participants emphasized individual responsibilities like self-discipline, self-care, and skepticism of virtual content; broader societal concerns about entrapment and diminished community agency; and design opportunities for promoting equity and access. Based on these findings, we offer design and methodological recommendations to better integrate the perspectives of male youth targeted for racial oppression into XR innovation to ensure that these tools are ethical, inclusive, and responsive to the communities they serve.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss research on extended reality (XR) technologies for children, including identifying risks, opportunities, and ethical guidelines.The workshop builds on prior child-computer interaction research on XR technologies, as well as prior SIGs and workshops focused on ethics.Our goal is to discuss state-of-the art research on XR technologies and outline ethical concerns and future research challenges.

The growing use of technology in K-8 classrooms highlights a parallel need for formal learning opportunities aimed at helping children use technology safely and protect their personal information. Even the youngest students are now using tablets, laptops, and apps to support their learning; however, there are limited curricular materials available for elementary and middle school children on digital privacy and security topics. To bridge this gap, we developed a series of micro-lessons to help K-8 children learn about digital privacy and security at school. We first conducted a formative study by interviewing elementary school teachers to identify the design needs for digital privacy and security lessons. We then developed micro-lessons--multiple 15-20 minute activities designed to be easily inserted into the existing curriculum--using a co-design approach with multiple rounds of developing and revising the micro-lessons in collaboration with teachers. Throughout the process, we conducted evaluation sessions where teachers implemented or reviewed the micro-lessons. Our study identifies strengths, challenges, and teachers' tailoring strategies when incorporating micro-lessons for K-8 digital privacy and security topics, providing design implications for facilitating learning about these topics in school classrooms.

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations.

Many children are growing up in a “digital-by-default” world, where technologies mediate many of their interactions. There is emerging consensus that those who design technology must support children's privacy and security. However, privacy and security are complex concepts that are challenging to design for, and centering the interests of children is similarly difficult. Through a document analysis of 90 HCI publications, we examine what problems and solutions designing for children's privacy and security addresses and how this research engages with children. Applying Solove's privacy taxonomy, we find that research addresses a range of problems related to information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion at the organizational, system, and individual levels. Children's participation in this research is largely limited to providing feedback rather than helping to guide the research itself. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for designers to sharpen their privacy and security contributions and center children in their work.

With the rapid shift to remote learning in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and students had to quickly adapt to what scholars have called "emergency remote learning" (ERL). This transition required increased reliance on digital tools, exacerbating privacy and security threats associated with expanded data collection and new vulnerabilities. In this study, we adopt a sociotechnical and infrastructural perspective to understand how these threats emerged through breakdowns and tensions in elementary school ERL. Through interviews with 29 US-based teachers and parents of elementary school students (grades PreK-6), we identify two core findings related to privacy and security. First, we detail three breakdowns in the ERL sociotechnical infrastructure: (1) reduced attention to privacy and security issues as parents and teachers cobbled together a patchwork of tools needed to make ERL work; (2) privacy and security risks that emerged from ambiguous and shifting school policies; and (3) the failure to adapt standard authentication mechanisms (e.g., passwords) to be usable by young children. Second, we identify tensions between parents' and teachers' desire to help children advance in their education and their desire for children's privacy and security in ERL, as well as tensions resulting from the collapse of home and school contexts. These findings collectively suggest that ERL exacerbated existing--and created new--privacy and security challenges for young students, and we argue these challenges will carry beyond the pandemic due to the increasing use of technology to supplement traditional education. In light of these findings, we recommend researchers and educators use a framework of care to develop social and technical approaches to improving remote learning in order to protect children's privacy and security.

We perpetuate, reinforce, and have the opportunity to disrupt systemic injustices through the actions we take as individuals. As an IDC community, we have a responsibility to reflect upon our behaviors and the commitments we make to ensure our engagements with youth, especially those that identify as Black or brown, are justice-centered. In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners to reflect on what is at stake if the IDC community does not intentionally take a justice-centered approach throughout our methods, our research questions, and our everyday interactions with youth. The goals of our workshop are two-fold: (1) To share stories about the actions we take as researchers with power to influence change in our interactions with youth, and (2) To establish the commitments the IDC community can make for more equitable design and research engagements with youth.

In this talk Tammy will briefly connect participants virtually to the conference site through tracing her own entree into Computer Science as a woman of color in North Carolina, sharing ways community experiences played pivotal roles. More broadly, she will share research insights from her research that illustrate the pivotal role of communities for STEM learning and that point to ways to mobilize communities to support such learning. Lastly, she will share some examples of STEM and computing learning environments that draw upon inherent characteristics of communities to promote life-relevant STEM learning.

Data analysis is central to sports training. Today, cutting-edge digital technologies are deployed to measure and improve athletes' performance. But too often researchers focus on the technology collecting performance data at the expense of understanding athletes' experiences with data. This is particularly the case in the understudied context of collegiate athletics, where competition is fierce, tools for data analysis abound, and the institution actively manages athletes' lives. By investigating how student-athletes analyze their performance data and are analyzed in turn, we can better understand the individual and institutional factors that make data literacy practices in athletics meaningful and productive-or not. Our pilot interview study of student-athletes at one Division I university reveals a set of opportunities for student-athletes to engage with and learn from data analytics practices. These opportunities come with a set of contextual tensions that should inform the design of new technologies for collegiate sports settings.

We introduce PrototypAR, an Augmented Reality (AR) system that allows children to rapidly build complex systems using paper crafts and to test their designs in a digital environment. PrototypAR combines lo-fidelity prototyping to facilitate iterative design, real-time AR feedback to scaffold learning, and a virtual simulation environment to support personalized experiments. Informed by three participatory design sessions, we developed three PrototypAR applications: build-a-bike, build-a-camera, and build-an-aquarium---each highlights different aspects of our system. To evaluate PrototypAR, we conducted four single-session qualitative evaluations with 21 children working in teams. Our findings show how children build and explore complex systems models, how they use AR scaffolds, and the challenges they face when conducting experiments with their own prototypes.

Elementary school educators increasingly use digital technologies to teach students, manage classrooms, and complete everyday tasks. Prior work has considered the educational and pedagogical implications of technology use, but little research has examined how educators consider privacy and security in relation to classroom technology use. To better understand what privacy and security mean to elementary school educators, we conducted nine focus groups with 25 educators across three metropolitan regions in the northeast U.S. Our findings suggest that technology use is an integral part of elementary school classrooms, that educators consider digital privacy and security through the lens of curricular and classroom management goals, and that lessons to teach children about digital privacy and security are rare. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, we identify design opportunities to help educators integrate privacy and security into decisions about digital technology use and to help children learn about digital privacy and security.

Children ages 8--12 spend nearly six hours per day with digital content, but they receive little formal instruction related to managing privacy online. In this study, we explore how games and storytelling can inform the development of resources to help children learn about privacy online. We present results from three co-design sessions with a university-based intergenerational design team that included eight children ages 8--11. During these sessions, we reviewed existing privacy resources with children and elicited design ideas for new resources. Our findings yield several recommendations for designers. Specifically, online privacy-focused educational resources should: (1) include relatable elements such as familiar characters and easily understandable storylines, (2) go beyond instructing children through "dos and don'ts" and equip children to make privacy-related decisions, and (3) expose children to a range of privacy consequences, highlighting the positive and negative outcomes that can result from disclosing and managing information online.

The ubiquitous use of social media by children offers a unique opportunity to view diverse funds of knowledge that may otherwise be overlooked. To leverage this insight, we have coupled the iterative development of our community-focused, Science Everywhere life-relevant science learning program together with an integrated social media app to engage learners aged 6--16 in science with parents, teachers, and mentors throughout their community. We found that learners' scientific funds of knowledge were often not evident in their posts alone; rather, they emerged through our triangulation of posts, interviews with youth and their parents, and observations of their learning experiences in our life-relevant science education program. Our findings suggest that leveraging new social media features to support contextual information, scientific scaffolds and creative expression may make children's implicit and more unconventional scientific funds of knowledge more apparent. Additionally, social media sharing in conjunction with other practices, such as discussing posts with learners and encouraging non-science posts, can uncover the rich contexts of children's social media sharing, which can illuminate their scientific thinking.

A major challenge in education is understanding how to connect learning experiences across settings (e.g., school, afterschool, and home) for youth. In this paper, we introduce and describe the participatory design process we undertook to develop Science Everywhere (SE), which is a sociotechnical system where children share their everyday science learning via social media. Public displays installed throughout the neighborhood invite parents, adults, peers, and community members to interact with children's ideas to better develop connections for learning across settings. Our case study of community interactions with the public displays illuminate how these technologies encouraged behaviors such as the noticing of children's ideas, recognition of people in the neighborhood, and bridging to new learning opportunities for youth.

Computing for social good has become a common topic in computing circles, with professional organizations and conferences sponsoring discussions on the relevance of "social good" material for computer science research [e.g., 1] and for education [e.g., 12,13,18].

We present early work developing an Augmented Reality (AR) system that allows young children to design and experiment with complex systems (e.g., bicycle gears, human circulatory system). Our novel approach combines low-fidelity prototyping to help children represent creative ideas, AR visualization to scaffold iterative design, and virtual simulation to support personalized experiments. To evaluate our approach, we conducted an exploratory study with eight children (ages 8-11) using an initial prototype. Our findings demonstrate the viability of our approach, uncover usability challenges, and suggest opportunities for future work. We also distill additional design implications from a follow-up participatory design session with children.

In this one-day workshop, we aim to bring together a community of researchers at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference who will share how they already make or plan to make equity-promoting fairness by allocating more resources and opportunities to those who need it? and inclusivity? the inclusion and meaningful participation of people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized? foundational to their research with children and families. By discussing theoretical and practice-based approaches, providing feedback on each other's research, and collectively identifying concerns and challenges in addressing equity and inclusivity when doing and assessing research in IDC, we intend to do twofold. First, we will build our understanding of how our approaches, designs, and/or methods may either be restricting or facilitating equitable access and participation of diverse children and their families. Second, we will work to establish and articulate approaches to our research that forefront equity and inclusivity, taking into account how intersecting identities affect how the children and families with whom we work have or do not have access to various sources of power.

Wearable sensing poses new opportunities to enhance personal connections to learning and authentic scientific inquiry experiences. In our work, we leverage the body and physical action as an engaging platform for learning through live physiological sensing and visualization (LPSV). Prior research suggests the potential of this approach, but was limited to single-session evaluations in informal environments. In this paper, we examine LPSV tools in a classroom environment during a four-day deployment. To highlight the complex interconnections between space, teachers, curriculum, and tool use, we analyze our data through the lens of Activity Theory. Our findings show the importance of integrating model-based representations for supporting exploration and analytic representations for scaffolding scientific inquiry. Activity Theory highlights leveraging life-relevant connections available within a physical space and considering policies and norms related to learners' physical bodies.

Children under age 12 increasingly use Internet-connected devices to go online. And while Internet use exposes people to privacy and security risks, few studies examine how these children perceive and address such concerns. To fill this gap, we conducted a qualitative study of 18 U.S. families with children ages 5-11. We found that children recognized certain privacy and security components from the contextual integrity framework, but children ages 5-7 had gaps in their knowledge. Children developed some strategies to manage concerns but largely relied on parents for support. Parents primarily used passive strategies to mediate children's device use and largely deferred teaching children about these concerns to the future. We argue that helping children develop strong privacy and security practices at a young age will prepare them to manage their privacy and security as adolescents and adults. We offer recommendations to scaffold children's learning on privacy and security.

We present and evaluate a new mixed-reality tool called SharedPhys, which tightly integrates real-time physiological sensing, whole-body interaction, and responsive large-screen visualizations to support new forms of embodied interaction and collaborative learning. While our primary content area is the human body, we use the body and physical activity as a pathway to other STEM areas such as biology, health, and mathematics. We describe our participatory design process with 20 elementary school teachers, the development of three contrasting SharedPhys prototypes, and results from six exploratory evaluations in two after-school programs. Our findings suggest that the tight coupling between physical interaction, sensing, and visualization in a multi-user environment helps promote engagement, allows children to easily explore cause-and-effect relationships, supports and shapes social interactions, and promotes playful experiences.

Partnering with parents and children in the design process can be important for producing technologies that take into consideration the rich context of family life. However, to date, few studies have examined the actual process of designing with families and their children. Without understanding the process, we risk making poor design choices in user-interactive experiences that take into account important family dynamics. The purpose of this investigation is to understand how parent-child relationships in families shape co-design processes and how they are reshaped through co-design. We document the evolutionary process and outcomes that exist in co-design partnerships between researchers and families. We found that parents' engagement patterns shifted more slowly than that of children's from observing and facilitating to design partnering practices. Our analysis suggests the importance of establishing and nurturing social bonds among parents, children, and researchers in the co-design process.

Many new technologies for children focus on fostering learning. However, designers and researchers often come from disparate traditions that either stress innovative design methodologies (e.g. participatory design) or rigorous examination of learning (e.g., design-based research). This workshop brings together researchers who are actively engaged in, or interested in, weaving together these research fields to develop usable, engaging, and innovative technologies that are also deeply grounded in theories of learning. We invite participants to submit position papers describing their work in progress. The goals of the workshop will be to better articulate the unique issues that arise at the intersection of interaction design and learning design, and develop an agenda for a next wave of research that draws a clear link between methodologies in these fields. All topic areas related to design, learning, and children are welcome.

In this paper, we present the design evolution of two social media (SM) tools: Scientific INQuiry (SINQ), which transformed into ScienceKit. We detail our motivations for using SM tools in science learning and the design decisions we made over a 2year, designbased research project. Our designs grew from our experiences using SM tools in the field and codesigning these systems with children. Our longitudinal case study and design narrative contribute to our understanding of the design and use of SM tools to support children's scientific inquiry. Specifically, we detail (1) the affordances and constraints we gleaned from the design evolution of SINQ to ScienceKit, (2) the potential of SM to guide learning behaviors, and (3) the role of SM for children and the community of adults and peers who support them.

Children are increasingly using social media tools in their lives. In addition, there is great interest in understanding how to design and evaluate social technologies to aid in children's learning and development. We describe two research endeavors that begin to address these issues. First, we introduce SINQ, a social media application that encourages children to practice Scientific INQuiry skills through collaborative participation. Second, we conducted a case study of SINQ with six children, ages 8-11, and collected log data of their interactions in the app. We applied learning analytics on this log data using a visual analytic tool called LifeFlow. The event-sequence visualizations showed how children engaged with scientific inquiry within the SINQ app, and most importantly illuminated how inquiry is not a linear process with a defined start and end. The children in our study traversed the inquiry process via diverse pathways, all of which were supported by the SINQ app.

Researchers often utilize the method of Participatory Design to work together with users to enhance technology. In particular, Cooperative Inquiry is a method of Participatory Design with children that involves full partnership between researchers and children. One important challenge designers face in creating learning technologies is that these technologies are often situated in specific activities and contexts. While children involved in these activities may have subject expertise (e.g., science inquiry process), they may not have design expertise (e.g., design aesthetics, usability). In contrast, children with design expertise may be familiar with how to design with researchers, but may not have subject expertise. Little is known about the distinction between child design and subject experts in Cooperative Inquiry. In this paper, we examine two cases -- involving children with design expertise and those with subject expertise -- to better understand the design process for both groups of children. The data from this study suggests that similarities do exist between the two cases, but that design and subject knowledge does play a significant role in how children co-design learning technologies.

Children often report that school science is boring and abstract. For this reason, we have developed Life-relevant Learning (LRL) environments to help learners understand the relevance that scientific thinking, processes, and experimentation can have in their everyday lives. In this paper, we detail findings that aim to increase our understanding of the ways in which technology can support learners' scientific practice and their personal meaning in LRL through the integration of two mobile apps into an LRL environment. Our analysis of the artifacts created in these systems show that technology must strike a balance between structured scaffolds and flexible personal design to support learners' scientifically meaningful experiences. Our data suggests that integration of media forms and mobile technology can provide creative ways for learners to express their scientific thinking, make artifacts of their personally meaningful experiences, and individualize artifacts in scientifically meaningful ways.

Face-to-face design with child and adult design partners is not always possible due to distant geographical locations or time differences. Yet we believe that the designs of children in areas not co-located with system builders, or who live in locations not easily accessed, are just as important and valid as children who are easily accessible especially when designing for a multinational audience. This paper reports on the prototype design process of DisCo, a computer-based design tool that enables intergenerational co-designers to collaborate online and asynchronously while being geographically distributed. DisCo contains tools that enable the designers to iterate, annotate, and communicate from within the tool. This tool was used to facilitate distributed co-design. We learned that children were less forgiving of their inability to draw on the computer than on paper, and they formed small, intergenerational design teams at their own locations when the technology did not work as they expected.