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.

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.

Even the most comprehensive plans may go awry when working with children and in places such as schools, which results in unexpected challenges or sometimes failures. Yet, research publications seldom report on these failures and events, and meaningful second hand experiences are rarely shared beyond the project or research team, if at all. To break this cycle, we propose a half-day workshop at IDC 2026 for collectively reflecting on project experiences - from (un)fortunate events to failures, to learn and grow as a community. We invite researchers and practitioners, young and experienced, to bring their experiences and to collectively compile a list of lessons for the CCI community. This workshop builds on prior initiatives on learning from failures, with the goal of incorporating regular collective reflections as a practice at IDC.

As generative AI (GenAI) chatbots become part of children’s lives, their perspectives on these technologies remain under-represented in research and design. This study examines how children use and perceive generative AI chatbots and how they imagine future possibilities with such tools. We conducted workshops in Vietnam, Finland, and Japan, where 32 children (ages 9-12) engaged in activities to imagine their future GenAI chatbots. Our findings show children’s perceptions of GenAI chatbots, which they use for information-seeking and learning. When imagining future GenAI chatbots, children envision chatbots that are bounded within domain-specific activities, helpful for learning, and safe. Our work highlights the importance of positioning children from being passive users of Gen AI chatbots to active contributors in shaping the future of human–AI interactions.

This paper examines how children’s capacity to imagine educational futures is shaped by the conditions under which participatory speculative design is introduced. Drawing on workshops with 47 eighth-grade students in India, we explore how scaffolding influences engagement with emerging technologies and future-oriented thinking. Across two sessions, students encountered generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and a social robot, engaging in design fiction and scenario drawing. Our findings show that rather than generating distant fantasies, speculative design enabled a critical examination of students’ existing educational contexts. With careful scaffolding, children articulated transformative visions that challenged exam-centric schooling and prioritized emotional well-being; without it, imaginaries remained anchored to present constraints. We contribute to Child-Computer Interaction research by framing scaffolding as a decolonial intervention essential for future-making in high-pressure pedagogical environments. Specifically, we propose affective scaffolding and agency-preserving design as frameworks to bridge emotional gaps and ensure human-centric innovation in the Global South.

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.

Children increasingly interact with a myriad of technologies in their everyday lives, yet are seldom invited to envision the future trajectories of these technologies or what futures they want to see. To address this gap, we conducted design futuring workshops with 31 school children in India (ages 10-13 years). Participants imagined future classrooms and the different types of technologies situated within these classrooms. Participants’ resultant socio-technical imaginaries reveal an underlying hope to be empowered in the learning process, underscoring the values of empathy, care, inclusion, and empowerment. Their imaginaries also highlight the everyday problems that concern them the most and how they imagine overcoming them, deliberating also on the role of humans in these futures. Our work contributes to Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research on engaging children to critically envision their digital futures by illustrating the value of design futuring and socio-technical imaginaries, especially created by an under-represented group, Indian children.

Our project supports children's critical AI engagement with through participatory workshops envisioning public spaces. We ran a workshop with 9-12 year olds (n=7) combining AI, puppet-making, performance, and design futuring to reimagine civic spaces. Participants used ChatGPT to visualize changes to local places, created puppets representing different viewpoints, and performed debates about the proposed changes. Our findings reveal children's critical engagement with AI as a design tool, preference for iterative refinement, and desires for authentic over 'AI-like' content. This work contributes methods for engaging children in civic discussions through making and performing futures. It also demonstrates how these methods can scaffold critical AI literacy.

Marginalization, oppression, and injustice remain deep-rooted challenges facing the world today. Information Systems (IS) scholars could make a difference and try to make the world a better place; however, there is a lack of design methods dedicated for that. Design methods deriving inspiration from critical research tradition hold great potential in this respect. We have examined how to embed values of critical research tradition, particularly such addressing collective empowerment, into the design process in a design research project in which we explored in collaboration with children critical design methods for the purpose of addressing a wicked societal problem of bullying. For this study, we analysed four design methods we experimented with from the viewpoint of values of the critical research tradition, particularly collective empowerment, embedded in and advocated by the methods. We identify variety in the methods in terms of critical values included, collective empowerment addressed, emergent factors identified, and extent of criticality advocated. We contribute to IS literature by offering insights on how IS research, practice and education can embed critical research tradition values, particularly addressing empowerment in the critical and collective senses, more strongly into the design process. We call for wild methods in terms of criticality and propose an initial set of design principles for their development.

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.

The integration of AI technologies in all domains of life raises ethical debates. Children and young people are not exempt from these discussions since AI is also an increasing part of their lives. This study explores teenagers’ (aged 13 to 16 years) views on AI with a focus on ethical thinking. This is a retrospective empirical study in which data from three cases involving young people in technology learning activities have been analysed to answer the following research questions: (i) What ethical challenges around AI do young people reflect upon and (ii) what ethical dimensions do these reflections connect to? We have adapted an existing framework outlining dimensions of ethical thinking to identify young people’s ethical reflections on AI in various learning activities. Our findings show how young people reflect on AI ethics, even without dedicated teaching on it and are able to consider various dimensions and make connections to everyday uses of AI raising ethical issues. Based on our findings, we advocate for an integrated approach of AI and ethics in learning activities about technology. We believe the framework presented in this study can be a valuable tool to inform further research and practice.

School children increasingly engage in designing and making activities, with the aim to promote creativity, increase peer collaboration, and engage with novel technologies. However, there is limited exploration of the impact of these activities. This study inquires what kinds of identities children (co)produce during design and making and how they evolve. Nexus analysis is used as a research strategy, drawing on multimodal research materials accumulated and gathered during a design and making project conducted with 11–12-year-old pupils. The research lens views social action as an intersection of participants’ histories, their mutual interaction orders, and discourses in place. The analysis entails scrutinizing the detailed aspects of identity production that are bound with wider discourses and interactions. Our findings show how identities of a maker, designer, change agent, performer, leader, content producer, and empathizer emerged, and how the competing orientations of being pupils and engaging in design and making that invite diverse types of identity production among the pupils, at the same time gaining agency as designers and makers, and ownership of their designs.

We suggest transformative agency is brought to the forefront of Participatory Design (PD) in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research to scaffold children's active engagement in matters related to digital technology and its effects on society. Based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we define children's transformative agency as their ability to actively change their own matters, their shared matters, or even societal matters for the better and more just society. We report on a framework for analyzing PD research with children and demonstrate how PD can support transformative agency of children through vignettes from two PD projects with children. Based on the vignettes, we provide a set of additional PD aims to consider when integrating the scaffolding of transformative agency explicitly in PD with children. A focus on children's transformative agency will contribute significantly to the maturing field of Computational Empowerment in CCI as an extension of the current PD work with children.

We report how designers support active engagement of neurodiverse children (13 -16 y.o.) in participatory design (PD) through “Design Partnering”. Design partnering denotes a process in which neurodiverse children are teamed up with neurotypical peers to help them overcome cognitive, social, and relational barriers and thus make their engagement more active during design. We contribute with studies of design partnering in three different PD activities: Field studies, Ideation, and Prototyping. We map out the opportunities and challenges we faced in our study when applying design partnering in PD research. We discuss our findings to lay out future studies to be conducted in Child-Computer Interaction research to provide more knowledge on the potentiality and challenges of design partnering in PD.

Traditional clothing is commonly worn in India and are visual markers of caste, religion, region, political affiliation, and gender. While family, friends, and communities implicitly monitor what is worn, it causes tensions between personal choices of self-expression and social expectations of conformity. This paper describes a speculative design project that explores clothing taboos and possible futures in private, public, and regional/national contexts. We describe a participatory workshop conducted to facilitate reflection about the clothing choices people make today, and to re-imagine the purpose of clothing in the future. The result was the design of a dystopian speculative world called Oneness exhibited in a series of photographs depicting provocative transformations in private, public, and regional/national life. The exhibition became a catalyst for deeper reflections and insights and we suggest speculative techniques could be used more often to create supportive spaces for discussions around culturally sensitive and taboo topics.

Nurturing children's competences needed for their digital futures and inviting them to adopt a protagonist role within design process have recently been emphasized in child-computer interaction research. For children to be able to act as design protagonists, they need design capital. We carried out a project with 13-14-year-olds and inquired under what circumstances the situated design capital of children emerged, enabling them to act as design protagonists without us deliberately steering them towards that. By employing the theoretical lens of nexus analysis, several factors were discovered that mediated children to utilize their situated design capital, including distributed agency, positive peer pressure, peer learning, and identity positioning. The findings imply that children's situated capital emanates from interactional phenomena, within which historical trajectories of the place, children, discourses, ideas, and objects intermingle.

This paper describes a therapeutic full-body controlled video game for children with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The game supports a co-located gameplay with a depth-sensing camera and a large media screen. Children play the game in pairs for improved impulse and behavior control, self-monitoring, peer-communication, and emotion regulation. The gaming was implemented as a part of a neuropsychological group intervention for children with confirmed deficits in attention or diagnosed ADHD. We present a final design of the game and associated gaming routines, explain anticipated health benefits of the gaming, outline how the gaming can be used for research and therapeutic purposes, and provide directions for future research.

With the forced reboot of our lives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our interpersonal relationships are nowhere yet everywhere. However, opportunities for initiating or maintaining friendships and romance in the physical world have dwindled. Within the context of India where multiple realities exist, the question arises – what is the future of these relationships? In this paper, we present the outcomes of a workshop looking at the future of relationships using design fiction. Participants worked in small teams to create scenarios that critically consider the future of love, friendships, and romance within the Indian context. Through the lenses of criticality, empowerment, and value creation, we examine the design scenarios and the design process including criticality of the designs, empowering experiences of the participants, and the perceived value gained from participating in such a workshop. Our findings indicate the potential of design fiction to allow participants to step out of their comfort zone into a critical stance in discussing love and intimacy. Based upon our findings, we discuss implications for design research, practice, and education.

Bullying is a problem concerning us all, especially our children. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has invited children to tackle this problem through design and technology. However, yet there is limited research including critical engagement with the topic, even if the critical agenda is arousing increasing interest in HCI. Design fiction has shown potential in addressing critical concerns. However, albeit design fiction has entered HCI method repertoire already some time ago, it is an ambiguous concept with multiple meanings and usages. We map and articulate some of this variety: fascinating, future-oriented, and provocative studies are identified, while also a lack of critical design fiction, aiming at empowerment of the power-weak. We contribute by exploring such kind of design fiction in collaboration with children to tackle the problem of bullying. We scrutinize our participatory and empowering design fiction process and outcomes and discuss their implications for HCI research and design fiction practice.

Bullying is a challenge concerning us all, and particularly our children. This has already been acknowledged by CHI, among others. Despite the interest, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the state of the art – a critical review is needed, addressing bullying in the lives of children, in the context of and/or by the means of design and technology, covering CHI as well as related computing fields, being inspired by the strong body of knowledge within human sciences. We report on a comprehensive literature review on the topic, with the aim to understand what and how has been done so far to handle this troublesome and widespread phenomenon as well as to indicate how to move the field forward. We report how the topic has been examined and with what kind of means tackled, revealing interesting underlying assumptions about design, technology and human agency.

Digital technologies are increasingly used with individuals with special needs for skill-building, social inclusion, and empowerment. However, different stakeholders involved in raising an individual with special needs have different and sometimes conflicting understanding of empowerment and motivations towards it. Using an empowerment framework, we collaboratively analyzed and critically reflected on the design and outcomes of three user studies conducted at a special needs school in New Delhi, India. The studies focused on learning how to make compost out of everyday kitchen waste, to assemble a solar lantern, and to buy groceries from a local store. Findings from the analysis provide insights into the complex socio-cultural conditions that enable, and in some cases limit, empowerment of individuals in an underserved and special needs context. We contribute to discussions on empowerment of children through design and use of digital technologies.

We present our exploratory work on globally inclusive online collaboration for schoolchildren in India and Finland, using CityCompass, an online virtual navigational application for conversational language learning. User studies with Indian children, who collaborated with a Finnish researcher, showed several barriers towards communication and collaboration, including issues from limited access to computers and gaming to socio-cultural effects of a large power distance and face-saving. By adding a dramatized scenario, the Bollywood Method, these barriers were reduced. Next, we replicated the study with Finnish children, who collaborated with an Indian researcher. Here, previous computer and gaming experience reduced the motivation towards communication. In this paper, we present studies conducted in Finland, compare it with the Indian ones, and discuss opportunities for inclusive collaboration between Indian and Finnish children. Overall, our findings indicate that online collaboration is affected by differences in computer skills, video gaming experience, and socio-cultural communication norms.

Our research focuses on facilitating access to cross-cultural collaborative applications for schoolchildren. In this paper, we present two user studies with students from an underprivileged region in Delhi. In the first study, we found that Indian students were hesitant when using the application as compared with Finnish students in a similar study, for example. We purport these challenges were social - related to face-saving and power-distance - and technical - related to lack of access to and experience with computers. In the second study, we presented a dramatized scenario before the task to address the socio-technical challenges. Our findings suggest that adding a dramatized scenario facilitated meaningful collaboration by (a) overcoming the lack of previous computer and gaming experience and (b) reducing social and cultural barriers towards communication. We believe these findings extend to cross-cultural collaboration between students with varying computer experience.

In this paper, we build a case for incorporating socio-technical aspirations of different stakeholders, e.g. parents, care-givers, and therapists, to motivate technology acceptance and adoption for children with autism. We base this on findings from two studies at a special school in New Delhi. First, with six children with autism, their parents and therapists we explored whether fitness bands motivate children with autism in India to increase their physical activity. Second, with five parents and specialists at the same school, we conducted interviews to understand their expectations from and current usage of technology. Previous work defines a culture-based framework for assistive technology design with three dimensions: lifestyle, socio-technical infrastructure, and monetary and informational resources. To this framework we propose a fourth dimension of socio-technical aspirations. We discuss the implications of the proposed fourth dimension to the existing framework.

Public display deployments are often subjected to various surprising and unwanted effects. These effects are frequently due to external factors properties and phenomena that are unrelated to the deployment. Therefore, we conducted a literature review within the public display domain to investigate the causes behind the reported issues. This work presents a taxonomy of external factors affecting deployments, consisting of six categories: weather, events, surroundings, space, inhabitants, and vandalism. Apart from a few positive examples, we predominantly found negative effects arising from these factors. We then identified four ways of addressing the effects: ignoring, adapting, solving, and embracing. Of these, ignoring and adapting are substantially more frequent responses than solving and embracing emphasizing the need for researchers to adapt. We present real-world examples and insights on how researchers and practitioners can address the effects to better manage their deployments.

CityCompass promotes collaborative conversational language learning by means of way-findings tasks situated in panoramic views of a city. Two remotely located participants have to navigate these 360 city panoramas as a tourist or a guide, to arrive at a preassigned destination. The application supports three modes of interaction and immersion: traditional mouse and keyboard interaction, embodied interaction using the Microsoft Kinect sensor and a virtual reality supporting 360 degree video panoramas on a mobile phone placed inside virtual reality googles (Samsung Gear VR).

Gesture-based interaction provides a multitude of benefits to individuals with disabilities, for example, enhancing social, motor and cognitive skills. However, applications that encourage self-efficacy by promoting a life-skill through simulations of real world scenarios are largely missing. We explore the benefits of using a gesture-based application for individuals with developmental disabilities. The context is a special school in New Delhi, Nai Disha, where we designed and developed an application, Kirana, that integrates arithmetic and social interaction to teach purchasing of items from a local grocery store. In our study, 18 participants with developmental disabilities, previously unable to visit a grocery store, used Kirana for three weeks. Our results indicate that gesture-based applications can teach a life skill and enable self-efficacy for individuals with developmental disabilities by breaking down complex tasks that require social, mathematical and decision-making skills.

Kirana is a gesture-based application that simulates purchasing experience at a local Indian grocery store. It provides individuals with developmental difficulties a safe and controlled environment to explore the processes of purchasing an item: namely, deciding items to buy (decision making), calculating costs and balance (mathematical skills), and interactions via pointing (social interaction). Previous research has established that gesture-based interaction has the potential to enhance social, motor and cognitive skills for individuals with developmental disabilities. Currently, translating learnings from gesture-based virtual applications to real world scenarios is underexplored. Kirana is an approach to simulating practical real interactions, by breaking down complex tasks that require social, mathematical and decision-making skills, and encouraging self-efficacy. Skills learnt by purchasing items with Kirana, are potentially transferable to a real world store.

There exists mounting evidence in favor of computer supported autism interventions at the individual level. However, the potential benefits of using computer supported collaboration to encourage social interactions between individuals with autism and typically developed individuals are underexplored, particularly in developing regions. We present an exploratory study of a collaborative gesture-based application, Balloons. The application encourages joint attention, which is defined as the shared attention between two individuals towards the same object. Using mixed methods, we evaluated Balloons for three weeks in New Delhi with ten medium-low functioning autistic children. Our findings suggest that employing CSC interventions for children with autism in India provide (a) observable improvements in social interaction with typically developed peers, (b) the opportunity to customize and individualize intervention to cater to a large spectrum of children and (c) the potential opportunity of reducing fears of certain objects.

Studying pervasive systems in the wild has recently gained significant interest. However, few methods exist that focus on the subjective of user experience of such systems rather than objective metrics, like performance and task success. Especially multimodal interaction in this context poses challenges to understanding how different input and output methods affect the users' experience. We present a new method for evaluating the experiential user experience of interactive systems. It combines two existing approaches from different fields: a questionnaire-based evaluation method called SUXES, intended for evaluating user expectations and experiences, and a theoretical experience framework, Experience Pyramid, originally developed for analyzing and improving experiential tourism products. The new method was used in two field studies of multimodal public display applications. Our findings show that the method is a practical approach for user experience evaluation in the wild, especially in the case of pervasive applications that aim to provide novel experiences rather than facilitate task-oriented information access.