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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, self- and peer-led learning, motivated by fun and self-fulfillment, and learning through mistakes. However, studies often describe activities involving a lot of guidance. As guidance may lead to both the process and outcomes influenced by those guiding the activity, it is also important to examine how projects evolve without the supporters' push. We take a nexus analytical approach to explore 1) how teens' background, interactions with others, and available materials and spaces are at play when they shape their ideas and outputs in a collaborative maker project with minimal support, and 2) how these factors can be considered to better support learning in such projects. The work carried out by five teens in a local FabLab was based on peer collaboration within changing apprentice mentor pairs. When they ideated and prototyped for a future school, researchers provided minimal support, mainly online. Without their push, teens quickly modified tasks which both guided and narrowed down their thinking. Their experiences from school environment and the FabLab space served as an inspiration as they designed solutions to overcome current problems in the current school setting or digital fabrication process. When making, they gravitated towards processes they had previous experience of or which they enjoyed, perhaps partly affected by the competing discourses of maker culture and expertise we observed to be present in the FabLab space. While building on existing skillsets, this may leave the potential of novel trajectories and expanding one's skills and competences unexplored. Teens' self-esteem improved as they turned from apprentices to mentors for their peers. This allowed them to process their learning from a different perspective. In general, our results paint a detailed picture of the roles of different participants in a maker project and provide an example of how familiar discourses of education persist in teens' designs. Looking at the project through the lens of Nexus analysis contributes to an increased understanding of the space for action and participants' histories, and interactions on the process, valuable for researchers studying DF and making, and practitioners working in makerspaces and FabLabs with different user groups. On a more practical level, our work contributes to a deeper understanding on how to include teens into non-guided and community-driven maker practices. We provide practical implications on how to support learning in collaborative making projects in informal learning situations, and regarding the role of the different actors and the environment in such situations. We also identify avenues for future research in this area.

The internet facilitates opportunities for adolescents to form relationships and explore their sexuality but seeking intimacy online has also become a stressor. As a result, adolescents often turn to the internet to seek support concerning issues related to sex because of its accessibility, interactivity, and anonymity. We analyzed 3,050 peer comments and 1,451 replies from adolescents (837 posts) who sought advice and/or support about online sexual experiences involving known others. We found peers mostly provided information and emotional support. They gave advice on how to handle negative online sexual experiences and mitigate their long-term repercussions, often based on their own negative experiences. They provided emotional support by letting teens know that they were not alone and should not blame themselves. A key implication of these findings is that these situations seemingly occurred regularly and youth were converging on a subset of norms about how to handle such situations in a way that supported one another. Yet, in some cases, they also resorted to victim-blaming or retaliating against those who broke these norms of "safe" sexting. Teens were grateful for emotional support and advice that helped them engage safely but were defensive when peers were critical of their relationships. Together, our findings suggest that youth are self-organizing to converge on guidelines and norms around safe sexting but have trouble framing their messages so that they are more readily accepted. In our paper, we contribute to the adolescent online safety literature by identifying youth-focused beliefs about safe sexting by analyzing the ways in which online peers give advice and support. We provide actionable recommendations for facilitating the exchange of positive advice and support via online peer-support platforms.

The opportunity for online engagement increases possible exposure to potentially risky behaviors for teens, which may have significant negative consequences. Effective family communication about online safety can help reduce the risky adolescent behavior and limit the consequences after it occurs. Our paper contributes a theory of communication factors that positively influence teen and parent perception of communication about online safety and provides design implications based on those findings. While previous work identified gaps in family communication regarding online safety, our study quantitatively identified the factors that significantly contribute to parents' and teens' differing perceptions. We analyzed data from a survey of 215 teen-parent pairs through a cross-sectional design and examined the factors that contribute to increased family communication about online safety. For parents, active mediation, technical monitoring, and a perceived positive affect of the teen were associated with higher levels of family communication. Our results were similar for teens, except that the teen's online safety concern and parental monitoring were also positively associated with increased family communication, while restrictive mediation was associated with lower levels of family communication. Many existing designs for online safety support a restrictive approach, despite teens not wanting technical restrictions. A key implication of our findings is that teens view active mediation and monitoring positively in respect to family communication. Contrary to mainstream narratives, this finding suggests that teens value parental involvement and do not desire complete independence online. By examining specific mechanisms which can hinder or improve family communication between parents and teens regarding online safety, we recommend solutions that give teens an active role in their online safety and facilitate effective family communication through cooperation between both parties, rather than technologies that promote parental restriction.

Children are growing up in an increasingly digitalized world and concerns for their online safety picture in research and in public debate. We contribute to the discussion about children's online safety through a discourses survey on public discussions carried out in Finland 2014-2015. We reveal that discourses on control, trust and involvement permeate debates on children's online safety, and we argue that this has important implications on the means that we develop for ensuring children's online safety. While some control is needed, instead of risking to lose their children's trust through restricting or monitoring, parents may want to build a trusting relationship with their children so that they can trust children to make good decisions and that the children trust them. There is a need to build technical mediation that is transparent and facilitates building of trust.