Smart home technologies are often designed to meet the needs of adults, yet children and pets also live with these systems without being meaningfully considered in their design. Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) researchers have shown the value of studying children's experiences and ideation of technologies used in the domestic space. In this pictorial, we explore experiences at the intersection of children, pets, and smart home technologies by analyzing data from an in-home study with 6-to-11-year-olds. Our analysis identifies five themes in how children perceive smart home technologies in the context of pet care: convenience, presence, physical comfort, emotional wellbeing, and responsibility. Grounded in children's everyday routines of playing with and looking after their pets, this work offers design directions for domestic technologies that account for non-human household members.

As generative AI (genAI) rapidly enters classrooms, accompanied by district-level policy rollouts and industry-led teacher trainings, it is important to rethink the canonical “adopt and train” playbook. Decades of educational technology research show that tools promising personalization and access often deepen inequities due to uneven resources, training, and institutional support. Against this backdrop, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 teachers from a large U.S. school district that was an early adopter of genAI. Our findings reveal the motivations driving adoption, the factors underlying resistance, and the boundaries teachers negotiate to align genAI use with their values. We further contribute by unpacking the sociotechnical dynamics—including district policies, professional norms, and relational commitments—that shape how teachers navigate the promises and risks of these tools.

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to youth well-being, and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an established approach for building ER skills. Clinicians often use creative mediums such as visuals and narratives to support ER through CBT, yet access and personalization remain limited. Generative AI (GenAI) shows promise for addressing these limitations, but its benefits and risks in youth ER remain underexplored, underscoring the need for expert perspectives. We interviewed 20 ER specialists–psychotherapists, art therapists, and psychiatrists–using a GenAI technological probe that generated CBT-based visuals and narratives. Clinicians highlighted GenAI’s potential as a “bridge” to help youth concretely identify and express emotions, practice personalized coping skills, and mediate ER conversations between home and clinics. They also cautioned that the vividness and unpredictability of GenAI outputs may trigger trauma or reinforce maladaptive thinking. We propose psychologically grounded design implications for GenAI to foster safe, engaging youth ER as a foundation for lifelong well-being.

The advent of Generative AI (GenAI) has raised discussions about its effects on individuals. However, little is known about its impact on children’s creative collaboration, despite its importance for social and cognitive development. We examined GenAI’s role in children’s creative collaboration through five co-design sessions with 28 children (ages 5-11) using diverse GenAI tools (text, image, video, voice); 17 parents participated in focus group interviews. Our findings show that GenAI can foster positive social dynamics by enabling “Human vs. AI” teaming and children’s co-creation with shared ownership. However, GenAI disrupted collaborations when roles between children were unclear, AI ignored group dialogue, and AI dominated children’s agency. Children and parents envisioned socially attuned AI that could play an “older sibling” role–scaffolding while allowing playful disagreement–while raising concerns about children’s overreliance on GenAI. This work advances understanding of GenAI in collaboration and proposes design implications for designing AI systems that support child-centered collaboration.

Prior research links teens’ social media use to a reduction in their sense of well-being. The current study investigates how design mediates this link, with an overarching goal of designing better social media experiences for teens. We conducted a mixed-method study with teens (N=25, Mage= 16.5 years) to investigate their moment-by-moment experiences and emotional states while using Instagram. Our analysis showed that teens’ experiences on Instagram often entailed sifting through a content soup dominated by uninteresting, irrelevant content. Boredom served as a reason to enter Instagram, a justification to leave, and as a dominant feeling during a session. The promise of social connection was the main motivator for teens to use Instagram. Teens developed strategies to maintain a state of emotional equilibrium as they sought moments of connection with friends: (1) Feed gatekeeping, (2) Backpedaling away from negative content, (3) Choosing to hide like-counts, and (4) Avoiding notification whiplash.

Early parenting is one of the strongest predictors of child well-being. Online social communities have shown promise in supporting parents across a range of contexts. However, we only have a limited understanding of how posters and commenters interact within a forum, or how well commenter responses can support complex parenting questions, such as attempts to change a child's behaviour or to apply new parenting approaches. We start addressing this gap by combining an empirical analysis of 1 year of parent posts from an exemplar online forum (Mumsnet) with literature on parenting interventions from psychology. In particular, we examine the types of question parents of 2-5 year olds seek help for around their children's behaviour, and the challenges with the support that they do (or do not) receive from the Mumsnet community. Combining empirical and theory-driven insights, we outline an 'information-to-application' gap that conceptually underpins the difficulties observed, and suggest plausible research directions that could address such design problems.

Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the pressures created by social media, such as heightened self-consciousness and the need for extensive self-presentation. In this study, we investigate how BeReal, a social media platform designed to counter some of these pressures, influences adolescents' self-presentation behaviors. We interviewed 29 users aged 13-18 to understand their experiences with BeReal. We found that BeReal's design focuses on spontaneous sharing, including randomly timed daily notifications and reciprocal posting, discourages staged posts, encourages careful curation of the audience, and reduces pressure on self-presentation. The space created by BeReal offers benefits such as validating an unfiltered life and reframing social comparison, but its approach to self-presentation is sometimes perceived as limited or unappealing and, at times, even toxic. Drawing on this empirical data, we propose design guidelines for platforms that support authentic self-presentation while fostering reciprocity and expanding beyond spontaneous photo-sharing. These guidelines aim to enable users to portray themselves more comprehensively and accurately, ultimately supporting teens' developmental needs, particularly in building authentic relationships.

Prior research indicates that many adolescents struggle to use social media intentionally, with negative impacts on well-being. This presents an important but under-researched opportunity to improve youth well-being through interaction design. We developed Locus, a mobile application that shapes adolescents’ entry experiences into the social media apps on their phones by prompting them to reflect on their social media intentions before they open an app and at the end of the day. In designing Locus, we combined psychology theories—to identify design targets—with co-design approaches—to design around these targets for youth's lived experiences. Following co-design work with nine teens (Mage=15.7 years), we conducted an open trial field deployment (N = 54; Mage=16.2 years) to explore how Locus was used and experienced by adolescents during their daily lives. Results provide preliminary evidence that in-the-moment interventions for self-regulation skills can support adolescents’ intentional social media use.

The ability to manage emotions effectively is critical to healthy psychological and social development in youth. Prior work has focused on investigating the design of mental health technologies for this population, yet it is still unclear how to help them cope with emotionally difficult situations in-the-moment. In this paper, we aim to explore the appropriation, naturally emerging engagement patterns, and perceived psychological impact of an exemplar interactive tangible device intervention designed to provide in-situ support, when deployed with n=109 youth for 1.5 months. Our findings from semi-structured interviews and co-design workshops with a subset of participants (n=44 and n=25, respectively) suggest the potential of using technology-enabled objects to aid with down-regulation and self-compassion in moments of heightened emotion, to facilitate the practice of cognitive strategies, and to act as emotional companions. Lastly, we discuss design opportunities for integrating situated and embodied support in mental health interventions for youth.

We investigated the experiences of 15 parents and their tween children (ages 8-12, n=23) during nature explorations using the NatureCollections app, a mobile application that connects children with nature. Drawing on parent interviews and in-app audio recordings from a 2-week deployment study, we found that tweens experiences with the NatureCollections app were influenced by tensions surrounding how parents and tweens negotiate technology use more broadly. Despite these tensions, the app succeeded in engaging tweens in outdoor nature explorations, and parents valued the shared family experiences around nature. Parents desired the app to support family bonding and inform them about how their tween used the app. This work shows how applications intended to support enriching youth experiences are experienced in the context of screen time tensions between parents and tween during a transitional period of child development. We offer recommendations for designing digital experiences to support family needs and reduce screen time tensions.

Researchers and designers have incorporated social media affordances into learning technologies to engage young people and support personally relevant learning, but youth may reject these attempts because they do not meet user expectations. Through in-depth case studies, we explore the sociotechnical ecosystems of six teens (ages 15-18) working at a science center that had recently introduced a digital badge system to track and recognize their learning. By analyzing interviews, observations, ecological momentary assessments, and system data, we examined tensions in how badges as connected learning technologies operate in teens' sociotechnical ecosystems. We found that, due to issues of unwanted context collapse and incongruent identity representations, youth only used certain affordances of the system and did so sporadically. Additionally, we noted that some features seemed to prioritize values of adult stakeholders over youth. Using badges as a lens, we reveal critical tensions and offer design recommendations for networked learning technologies.

We investigated changes in and factors affecting American adolescents’ subjective wellbeing during the early months (April – August 2020) of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Twenty-one teens (14-19 years) participated in interviews at the start and end of the study and completed ecological momentary assessments three times per week between the interviews. There was an aggregate trend toward increased wellbeing, with considerable variation within and across participants. Teens reported greater reliance on networked technologies as their unstructured time increased during lockdown. Using multilevel growth modeling, we found that how much total time teens spent with technology had less bearing on daily fluctuations in wellbeing than the satisfaction and meaning they derived from their technology use. Ultimately, teens felt online communication could not replace face-to-face interactions. We conducted two follow-up participatory design sessions with nine teens to explore these insights in greater depth and reflect on general implications for design to support teens’ meaningful technology experiences and wellbeing during disruptive life events.

Can a mobile application encourage children to spend more time outdoors and promote their connectedness to nature? In this paper, we present results from a three-week experimental deployment study of NatureCollections, a mobile application that allows users to build, curate, and share nature photo collections. Twenty-eight children (aged 9-12) and their parents participated in the study; 15 used the NatureCollections app, and 13 used a basic Photo app. We found that the NatureCollections app significantly increased the time children spent outdoors compared to the Photo app. Children in both groups said they felt happy and excited about spending time in nature. However, children in the NatureCollections group reported that time spent outside with the app increased their curiosity about the types of species and plants they saw and photographed. Children in the NatureCollections group also engaged in nature-based conversations with their parents, and even sought to look up information online about the plants and animals they observed. In contrast, children in the basic Photo app group did not display this level of curiosity about what they saw in nature, and the photos they took were driven largely by the aesthetic qualities of nature elements. Our results suggest that NatureCollections promotes and supports children's connectedness to nature.

With its roots dating to popular television shows of the 1960s such as Star Trek, fanfiction has blossomed into an extremely widespread form of creative expression. In the past 20 years, amateur fanfiction writers, often young people between the ages of 13 and 25, have published over 61.5 billion words of fiction in online repositories, an amount that rivals the Google Books English fiction corpus of 80 billion words covering the past five centuries. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways.

Through focus groups (n=61) and surveys (n=2,083) of parents and teens, we investigated how parents and their teen children experience their own and each other's phone use in the context of parent-teen relationships. Both expressed a lack of agency in their own and each other's phone use, feeling overly reliant on their own phone and displaced by the other's phone. In a classic example of the fundamental attribution error, each party placed primary blame on the other, and rationalized their own behavior with legitimizing excuses. We present a conceptual model showing how parents' and teens' relationships to their phones and perceptions of each other's phone use are inextricably linked, and how, together, they contribute to parent-teen tensions and disconnections. We use the model to consider how the phone might play a less highly charged role in family life and contribute to positive connections between parents and their teen children.

We synthesize insights from a multi-year project involving the design and implementation of a digital badge system with youth co-designers at a science center. Using stakeholder interviews and surveys, participatory design session data, and user analytics, we identify the sociotechnical, sociocultural, and technical challenges of long-term badge implementation and propose several recommendations for the design and implementation of future badge systems. By identifying these challenges and providing recommendations that foreground stakeholder values and participation, we show how to support implementation throughout the entire design-to-implementation cycle.

Many smartphone users engage in compulsive and habitual phone checking they find frustrating, yet our understanding of how this phenomenon is experienced is limited. We conducted a semi-structured interview, a think-aloud phone-use demonstration, and a sketching exercise with 39 smartphone users (ages 14-64) to probe their experiences with compulsive phone checking. Their insights revealed a small taxonomy of common triggers that lead up to instances of compulsive phone use and a second set that end compulsive phone use sessions. Though participants expressed frustration with their lack of self-control, they also reported that the activities they engage in during these sessions can be meaningful, which they defined as transcending the current instance of use. Participants said they periodically reflect on their compulsive use and delete apps that drive compulsive checking without providing sufficient meaning. We use these findings to create a descriptive model of the cycle of compulsive checking, and we call on designers to craft experiences that meet users' definition of meaningfulness rather than creating lock-out mechanisms to help them police their own use.

Influencing adolescent interest in computing is key to engaging diverse teens in computer science learning. Prior work suggests that informal mentorship may be a powerful way to trigger and maintain interest in computing, but we still know little about how mentoring relationships form, how mentors trigger and maintain interest, or what qualities adolescents value in informal mentors. In a 3-week career exploration class with 18 teens from underrepresented groups, we had students write extensively about their informal computing mentors. In analyzing their writing, we found that most teens had informal computing mentors, that mentors were typically teachers, friends, and older siblings (and not parents or school counselors), and that what teens desired most were informal mentors that were patient, helpful, inspiring, and knowledgeable. These findings suggest that computing mentors can come in many forms, that they must be patient, helpful, and inspiring, but that they also require content knowledge about computing to be meaningful. Future work might explore what knowledge of computing is sufficient to empower teachers, parents, peers, and family to be effective computing mentors.

Balancing the dynamics between industry, academia, and stakeholders in a participatory design (PD) project can be challenging, particularly with teens as design partners. In this reflective case study of digital badge design, we attempt to untangle complex PD work that incorporates several groups, each with their own vocabulary, area of expertise, and position in a perceived project structure hierarchy. Using participant interviews that reflect on the design process, triangulated with video, field notes, and design artifacts, we determined that the adolescent stakeholders, science center staff, researchers, and industry professionals viewed the design process through distinct lenses based on their communities of practice, which affected how they perceived the project. Our findings contribute new insight into how youth stakeholders perceive their involvement and role in participatory design practices within a complex design project.

We present Group Touch, a method for distinguishing among multiple users simultaneously interacting with a tabletop computer using only the touch information supplied by the device. Rather than tracking individual users for the duration of an activity, Group Touch distinguishes users from each other by modeling whether an interaction with the tabletop corresponds to either: (1) a new user, or (2) a change in users currently interacting with the tabletop. This reframing of the challenge as distinguishing users rather than tracking and identifying them allows Group Touch to support multi-user collaboration in real-world settings without custom instrumentation. Specifically, Group Touch examines pairs of touches and uses the difference in orientation, distance, and time between two touches to determine whether the same person performed both touches in the pair. Validated with field data from high-school students in a classroom setting, Group Touch distinguishes among users "in the wild" with a mean accuracy of 92.92% (SD=3.94%). Group Touch can imbue collaborative touch applications in real-world settings with the ability to distinguish among multiple users.

With its roots dating to popular television shows of the 1960s such as Star Trek, fanfiction has blossomed into an extremely widespread form of creative expression. The transition from printed zines to online fanfiction repositories has facilitated this growth in popularity, with millions of fans writing stories and adding daily to sites such as Archive Of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, FIMfiction.net, and many others. Enthusiasts are sharing their writing, reading stories written by others, and helping each other to grow as writers. Yet, this domain is often undervalued by society and understudied by researchers. To facilitate the study of this large but often marginalized community, we present a fully anonymized data release (via differential privacy) of the metadata from a large fanfiction site (to protect author privacy, story, profile, and review text is excluded, and only metadata is provided). We use visual analytics techniques to draw several intriguing insights from the data and show the potential for future research. We hope other researchers can use this data to explore further questions related to online fanfiction communities.

From Harry Potter to American Horror Story, fanfiction is extremely popular among young people. Sites such as Fanfiction.net host millions of stories, with thousands more posted each day. Enthusiasts are sharing their writing and reading stories written by others. Exactly how does a generation known more for videogame expertise than long-form writing become so engaged in reading and writing in these communities? Via a nine-month ethnographic investigation of fanfiction communities that included participant observation, interviews, a thematic analysis of 4,500 reader reviews and an in-depth case study of a discussion group, we found that members of fanfiction communities spontaneously mentor each other in open forums, and that this mentoring builds upon previous interactions in a way that is distinct from traditional forms of mentoring and made possible by the affordances of networked publics. This work extends and develops the theory of distributed mentoring. Our findings illustrate how distributed mentoring supports fanfiction authors as they work to develop their writing skills. We believe distributed mentoring holds potential for supporting learning in a variety of formal and informal learning environments.

Prior work on adolescent interest development shows that mentorship can promote interest in a subject while reshaping beliefs about the subject. To what extent do these same effects occur in computing, where interest and beliefs have traditionally been negative? We conducted two studies of the Puget Sound region in the United States, surveying and teaching 57 diverse adolescents with interests in computing. In the first study, we found that interest in computing was strongly related to having a mentoring relationship and not to gender or socioeconomic status. Teens with mentors also engaged in significantly more computing education and had more diverse beliefs about peers who engaged in computing education. The second study reinforced this finding, showing that teens who took a class from an instructor who aimed to become students' teacher-mentor had significantly greater positive changes in interest in computing than those who already had a mentor. These findings, while correlational, suggest that mentors can play a key role in promoting adolescent interest in computing.

Children and teens have valuable insights to offer in the design of sociotechnical learning tools and environments. Prior work has identified a range of participatory design (PD) techniques that have been used successfully to engage youth of various ages in the design process. Less understood is how youth experience and learn from their engagement in specific PD techniques. Although recent work has begun to address this understudied area, it has focused primarily on children, not adolescents. In the current study, we document the learning opportunities experienced by a group of high school students who participated in a series of six PD sessions focusing on the design of a digital badge system that recognizes and rewards out-of-school science learning. We discuss how these learning opportunities, actualized through scaffolded reflection, contributed positively to the design of the digital badge system. This work advances knowledge of how and why engaging youth in PD can contribute to effective designs of sociotechnical learning systems.

Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space. Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse, thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well.

Interaction logs generated by educational software can provide valuable insights into the collaborative learning process and identify opportunities for technology to provide adaptive assistance. Modeling collaborative learning processes at tabletop computers is challenging, as the computer is only able to log a portion of the collaboration, namely the touch events on the table. Our previous lab study with adults showed that patterns in a group's touch interactions with a tabletop computer can reveal the quality of aspects of their collaborative process. We extend this understanding of the relationship between touch interactions and the collaborative process to adolescent learners in a field setting and demonstrate that the touch patterns reflect the quality of collaboration more broadly than previously thought, with accuracies up to 84.2%. We also present an approach to using the touch patterns to model the quality of collaboration in real-time.

Integrating programming and computer science into the K-12 curriculum is of national importance. This poster reports on our experience creating an eighteen-week lab curriculum for fifth grade students. Using Processing, an open source programming language and IDE that is built on the Java programming language, we developed and taught eighteen separate lab components introducing basic coding concepts appropriate for fifth grade. These lab modules were developed by a team consisting of a fifth grade teacher, a computer science master's student, and a computer science professor. The labs were taught to over 100 fifth grade students in the 2014-15 academic school year at a public school, Peabody Charter School. All coding labs produced visual output, either static scenes or animations. Topics included basic syntax with a large focus on two dimensional spatial reasoning, but also included three different modules focused on concepts from the fifth grade science curriculum. All curriculum is available at http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/Outreach/PCS/PCS5.html. This poster breaks down the basic lab components developed and presents challenges and positive outcomes. In general, students enjoyed the exercises; the teacher observed that all students were eager to complete the labs. Prior to this experience the teacher had no programming knowledge and learned alongside the students each week. He continues to teach the Processing modules in the fifth grade for the 2015-16 school year.

This paper investigates high school students' perceptions of the opportunities and challenges of using digital badges to recognize and reward the skills and achievements they acquire in an afterschool science education program. Focus groups and usability tests were conducted with 10 students during the design of a badge system prototype for use in the program. We found that students recognized opportunities for personal empowerment in their use of badges, but also expressed concerns about sharing badges in various online contexts. The findings provide new insight into the values and goals that learners bring to discussions of digital badges in education. These insights hold relevance for designers of education-based badge systems as well as educators seeking to introduce badges into their practice.

This paper describes an application of classroom technology in support of teaching through the use of examples and active learning techniques. Here we report on using Classroom Presenter, a Tablet PC based classroom interaction syst, in a senior level course in Algorithms -- a domain for which the instructor believes working on sample probls is critical to student learning in the classroom. The role of the technology was to integrate activities into the lecture so that students have the opportunity to work with concrete examples in class, while the instructor can collect and review student work in real time, incorporating selected student answers into the discussion. In this paper, we describe the pedagogical goals of the instructor, the types of activities used to achieve those goals, and the role that technology played in supporting those goals and activities. The contributions of the paper are in showing how classroom technology can be used to support pedagogical choices, as well as in phasizing the value of having clear pedagogical goals when incorporating a new technology in the classroom. We believe the application of technology as illustrated in this work could bring similar benefits to the instruction in other disciplines.