This paper advances a collective research manifesto for Computational Empowerment (CE) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI), grounded in diverse practices across global contexts. Drawing on five cases from Asia, Europe, and North America, we examine how CE commitments materialize in real world settings, revealing both their transformative potential and the tensions they introduce. Our cases illustrate that CE is inherently context dependent, socially situated, and shaped by surrounding structures. We identify key directions for extending CE: embedding critical and ethical perspectives, foregrounding situatedness and relationality, challenging convenient choices, and questioning design assumptions. This involves strengthening children’s agency in shaping computational systems and widening CE’s reach through more inclusive, sustainable practices. We offer this work as intentionally incomplete—an invitation to ongoing dialogue and collective action toward empowering children in computing.

The Human Computer Interaction community is well positioned to address socio-technical issues in post-digital education. However, relevant research has not fully captured how learning with and about emerging technologies is transforming the teaching profession and associated practices. This oversight hinders the implementation of Computational Empowerment, i.e. the critical deconstruction and creative construction of technology, in classrooms. Thus, this paper builds an empirically-grounded bridge between educational practice and HCI research. Analyzing semi-structured interviews and creative design tasks with 16 teachers, we uncover unarticulated needs and diverse teaching realities and manifest them in several teacher personas. These personas move beyond generic “teacher” concepts and provide actionable requirements to ensure relevant and sustainable HCI research and practice in educational contexts. Our work allows HCI research to anticipate diverse challenges and to develop targeted technological and educational solutions that empower teachers and harness the transformative potential of CE in the classroom.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

In the ongoing process of the digital transformation of society, corresponding competencies are required from children more than ever. The concept of computational empowerment (CE) promotes confident and reflective engagement with digital technology, which often falls short in formal education. This work outlines how both entertainment and serious games can be used to support the cause of CE and what opportunities they offer for more empowering learning in school settings. The use of digital games appears to be a promising way to connect with the lifeworld of young people and thus offering a low-threshold and differentiated starting point. In this context, the focus should be placed on a stronger establishment of the protagonist role to empower students to engage with digital technologies in depth. In the Serious Game Changers project, students created their own educational modules on specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using digital games and creating new artifacts as learning objects through remixing game elements. In this project, students should be empowered to become active participants by designing with the help of commercial and serious games. Thus giving them their own voice in future (formal) educational settings and promoting future skills in order to make them self-confident 'protagonists' of their surroundings.

The rapid advancement of digital technology is accompanied by increasing demands for digital literacy education for children and adolescents. Previous works often emphasize the need for promoting empowering learning experiences and creating opportunities for active participation in digitalization. Especially in child-computer interaction research, participatory design (PD) has been established as a means to meet these demands. However, to advance the integration of PD into formal education, it is necessary to align PD’s creative, self-directed, and design-based learning settings with the often tight constraints of formal educational institutions. We consider the identification of suitable assessment and evaluation methods as an important contribution to further this alignment. Thus, this paper outlines preliminary findings from a review of works included in the 2018-2022 IDC conference proceedings, that address the evaluation of PD projects in formal educational settings. Only a small number of publications meet the inclusion criteria based on given constraints in this settings. Finally, we discuss preliminary insights regarding feasible evaluation methods and outline how the scarcity of matching works may point to an important research gap regarding the integration of PD with formal education.

This study focused on a bachelor- university-level course that aims to design and implement a robotic-coding camp to train pre-service teachers. Seventeen pre-service teachers participated in this study conducted in the Computational Empowerment Lab at the Center of Teacher Education at the University of Vienna. The researchers aimed to identify specific improvement strategies for in-service and pre-service teachers to enhance their pedagogical practices in designing a robotic-coding camp by promoting student critical thinking, computational thinking, and problem-solving competencies. Additionally, the study proposed to identify the relevant features of the camp's design and implementation that can promote practitioners' engagement and address the challenges they face. The course was offered during the summer semester of 2023. For the procedure of the study, pre-service teachers thought about a problem or situation using the phenomena-based learning method and explained the problem using mediating tools, including educational robots, 3D printers, laser-cutting, and creative Lego boxes, among others. At the end of the course, students developed their project, designed a prototype of a robotic-coding camp, and created digital stories as real-world basis problem statements for their project. Students' assignments and group work interactions, including forum discussions in Moodle, reflection papers, and hands-on activities, were used as data sources. Data collected and analyzed by qualitatively. Participatory action research was used as a research method. The results provide guidelines for how to design and implement robotic coding camps and digital stories for teachers who might want to implement a robotic camp in their future careers. In addition, the results suggest improvement strategies for designing robotic coding activities, including four action steps: (1) phenomenon-based problem statement, (2) visualizing the problem as a digital story, (3) finding a pattern in the problem and (4) creating the learning environment and coding. The most challenging part was the third step, in which participant had difficulty finding a pattern within the problem.

This study examines the “Digital Transformations” course at the University of Vienna, which is designed for a broad audience and focuses on various aspects of digitalization. It incorporates didactic methods and aims to meet students assumed higher-order thinking learning expectations. The research investigates students' expectations and concerns, as well as their alignment with existing taxonomies of learning objectives within the course context. Data was collected with pre- and post-tests in a mixed methods design. The study utilizes qualitative open-coding analysis and quantitative descriptive analysis methods. The results indicate that students primarily expect to acquire knowledge and understanding, rather than to engage in higher-order thinking. Their expectations revolve around content related to different themes, including understanding of digitalization, practical application, ethical and social implications, digital competencies, multidisciplinary approaches, critical thinking, interactivity, and engagement. Specifically, students had concerns about the course content's theoretical focus, uninteresting content, lack of coherence, information depth, assignments overload, fear of being overwhelmed, time pressure, fear of missing out, lack of prior knowledge, understanding of the topic, lack of interaction, technological challenges, practical relevance, and psychological and physical effects of digitalization. The post-test results show a high level of student satisfaction, particularly in terms of delivery of the expected content.

In this paper, we explore students' motivation to use digital technologies before and after a course aimed at contributing to students' digital empowerment and critical perspective on digitalization. Based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), we designed a questionnaire to observe changes in students' perceived competence, autonomy and relatedness. In addition to students' motivation, we investigated students' technology use continuance intention following Information Systems Continuance Theory. The surveys took place in the winter terms of 2020/21 and 2021/22 in a pretest-postest format. The course was open to students of all disciplines. As the questionnaire of this study was also distributed in a similar course in the teacher education program, we compared the responses of the students from all disciplines with the responses of prospective teachers. Due to the timing of the questionnaires, we also contextualized our findings regarding distance learning regulations during the early years of the pandemic. We validated and evaluated the questionnaire using exploratory factor and exploratory correlation analysis and found that students' perceived competence and perceived relatedness increased after course participation in both years. In line with SDT, these findings are also consistent with students reporting an increase in intrinsic motivation in both years. Students' perceived autonomy became more diverse in both years. In this regard, our findings support research suggesting that COVID-19 and distance learning regulations had a negative impact on students' perceptions of digital media autonomy. The comparison of results between the all-discipline cohort and the teacher education cohort showed that students benefited differently from the course depending on their field of study, which will be taken into account in future course iterations.

This full paper in the Innovative Practice Category presents an approach to anchor Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) contents in higher education. We are particularly interested in how a MOOC can be included in a course design that supports critical discourse in a transformative, significant learning framework. In a regular university course on digital transformations in society, an integration online event was organized halfway through a MOOC phase. The MOOC replaced lectures for 5 weeks, with the event happening in the middle of this phase. The event drew on the flipped classroom concept, but focused more on reflection rather than problem solving. More than 170 students participated in the online event to discuss critical questions based on MOOC topics and their experience while learning with the MOOC. In both cases, participants first discussed in smaller groups of three, before they met in six large groups moderated by researchers. The individual discussion contributions were documented simultaneously in a collaborative online tool by representatives from each group. Additionally, moderators took notes of the discussion processes. In the discussion round on learning, groups shared significant events in learning with the MOOC, aspects that facilitated their learning and areas of improvement regarding the MOOC platform. We further asked students about digital competencies they needed to navigate the MOOC as well as competencies they gained in learning with it. We evaluated student contributions on learning with the MOOC in a qualitative content analysis. Our evaluation hints at the interpersonal atmosphere in the discussion groups and at didactic caveats. A tentative research gap may be inferred from students' difficulty in exploring significant events: The MOOC enabled self-paced learning, but in itself may not thoroughly facilitate transformative learning and communicative competency. Concerning digital competencies, the majority of student responses refer to technical competency as essential for working with the MOOC. Many student responses point to critical thinking as the primary promoted competency. These responses correspond to the reflective depth of essays students wrote after the MOOC phase. In the final feedback on the online event, students particularly valued the interactive approach taken, the interesting discussions and the mix of didactic methods in the online event.

This paper discusses the course 'Gameful Design' held as part of the computer science master curriculum at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). We argue that the challenge of meaningfully teaching serious game design and gamification design is not solved by solely imparting design guidelines. It is a matter of conveying a method of how to engage with a real-world problem, how to ideate and explore, and how to iterate and reflect on gameful design. We describe the three methodological cornerstones the course is built on - research-based teaching, design thinking and explorative design - and outline the format of the course. From a relective practice perspective, we give structured tangible advice how to run such a course in the form of guidelines and we describe the impact it had on our own research.

Inclusive education deals with the participation of vulnerable and marginalised - especially disabled - people in learning and with reducing exclusive aspects within and from education. Communication skills under an inclusive perspective are to be understood as more than spoken or written word. Levels of languages used and alternative modes of communication are to be explored and harnessed.

While studies point to the positive potential of games for health to increase patient engagement and to a need to consider longer-term perspectives, there is a lack of more tangible knowledge on how to design for long-term engagement in games for health. This paper makes a contribution in this space by drawing a reflective arc across three games for health projects from areas such as rehabilitation, prevention and chronic disease. We discuss the projects using a research through design lens and reflect on user research data and design artifacts from the perspective of the involved game designers. The results are design considerations towards long-term engagement in games for health. These considerations present a body of intermediate-level knowledge [19] oriented towards maximising the potential of the design space in early stages of games for health projects. The considerations are structured into those relevant to gameplay, research design and application context.

Difficulty in TETRIS is adjusted by adapting the speed with which blocks fall. In this contribution, we describe results of an exploratory study in which we investigated relationships between players' performance and their subjective assessment of difficulty and fun. We tested five different algorithms that, instead of adjusting game speed, adjust difficulty by choosing blocks based on the current game state. With our results, we establish pile height and bumpiness as parameters that indicate the performance of a player during a live game, discuss the inherent difficulty of different block choosing algorithms and show how the relationship between fun and perceived difficulty varies for distinct player groups. With regard to adapting difficulty, we argue that one can still teach an old dog such a TETRIS a lot of new tricks.

INTERACCT is a multidisciplinary research project, where a communication tool in form of a serious video game was implemented. Target group are young and adolescent patients which suffered leukaemia or similar diseases that indicate a stem cell transplantation as therapy. After the transplantation, patients are required to stay at home for 12–24 months and report their health status to their after-care medical team. To ease this reporting process, INTERACCT was conceptualized and a prototype was implemented. Through smartphones, tablets or desktop PCs the patients report their data to the medical team, which accesses this data through a newly developed web-system. The system is highly adaptable and customizable, and can be further extended using state-of-the-art technologies like Microsoft KINECT. This paper describes background information, the concept and finally the implementation of the prototype system.