The increasing pervasiveness of inclusive educational environments poses an urgent need to implement research methodologies and practices that could shed light on how children's social interactions unfold in such contexts. Our work explores the use of mobile eye tracking technology in naturalistic, inclusive K12 education settings towards a richer understanding of the children’s interactive behaviours. This paper presents the children’s responses to, experiences with and impressions about the naturalness of using mobile eye tracking glasses during a collaborative group task. Results highlight the importance of understanding the children’s experiences to foster naturalistic research environments that closely reflect real-life complexity. Our work contributes towards the deployment of research designs in naturalistic contexts, providing important clues towards the collection of ecologically valid real-world data.

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: India, the United Kingdom and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in India employ dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland use a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices.

The Children in the Centre (CiC) framework, introduced in this paper, facilitates successful multidisciplinary research and design collaboration in computer science and special education with partners in non-academic contexts. The CiC framework emphasizes the active role of children and their families in the research and design processes. Practical tips for including children with special needs in the design and development of technologies are also described.

Based on results from the technologies for children with individual needs project and two case projects, we propose a new multidisciplinary framework for research between computer science, educational technology, and special education. The framework presents a way to conduct research that aims at developing new methods for technology-enhanced special education and for developing adaptable software and hardware tools for individual needs in educational settings.

Educational robotics is used worldwide in education as a learning tool, but surprisingly rarely in special education. In our study educational robotics and the kids' club working model were brought into special education which usually lacks educational technology tools. Through qualitative action research, we have identified various advantages that educational robotics can bring into learning. The robotic tools made it possible for the students to practice and learn many necessary skills, like collaboration, cognitive skills, self-confidence, perception, and spatial understanding. The encouraging results support the second phase of the study that will analyze more concretely how technology should be developed to become more flexible and usable for all learners and what we can learn from students with individual needs through the use of technology