We present the Solarpunk Futures Construction Kit, a modular system that enables collective worldbuilding with a shared energy infrastructure. Participants build elements of a future city that connect to a solar-powered microgrid, where all projects depend on the same energy source. At the conference, participants engage in a short drop-in activity in which they build a small project, connect it to the grid, and observe how it interacts with others. Through this process, sustainability and speculation are experienced as shared, material practices, rather than abstract concepts. Positioned within constructionist and participatory design traditions in IDC, this work introduces objects to imagine with: tangible systems that support speculative thinking by embedding participants’ ideas within a shared material environment. The kit shifts worldbuilding from describing possible futures to constructing them collectively through a shared infrastructure.

Learning to play music is an embodied process, but traditional tools like scores and recordings overlook the role of gesture. While video tutorials offer visual cues, they remain detached from the instrument. We present ReTouche, an interactive system that projects synchronized notes and hand gestures directly onto the actuated keys of a player piano. The system includes a pipeline for adapting publicly available overhead-view YouTube videos and supports interactions for video-based learning, such as sectional practice, layered guidance, and self-recording. We evaluate ReTouche through a comparative structured observation study with YouTube-based self-learning (n=18), a two-week autoethnography study (n=3), and a focus group with professional piano teachers (n=4). Our findings show that embodied representations can ground self-guided piano learning by anchoring gesture, sound, and action within the instrument. Learners appropriated these representations to develop strategies and sustain motivation, while teachers saw potential for integrating ReTouche as a complement to conventional pedagogy.

MirrorMorphose is an interactive mirror that uses gaze as an emotional portal between space and time. When the viewer maintains eye contact with their reflection, the image gradually morphs into a childhood version of themselves, a family member, or another person, who stares back and listens carefully, inviting a dialogue across identity and time. Through this slow visual transformation, the project explores how sustained gaze fosters empathy, self-recognition, and the blurring of boundaries between self and other. Drawing from practices of meditation, hypnosis, and therapeutic mirroring, MirrorMorphose proposes the gaze as an active medium of connection, both technological and intimate. The project challenges the viewer to confront their own reflection as a lived encounter, where memory, emotion, and technology intertwine. In doing so, seeing becomes a form of becoming, engaging viewers in having reflections or conversations in a meditative act of meeting oneself through the eyes of another.

Increasingly, IoT kits are used in pedagogical contexts to support learning experiences and teach students about IoT. However, few of them focus on both the technical aspects and the societal implications of IoT, such as cybersecurity and privacy. In this paper, we describe the Orbit IoT Kit, a micro:bit-based toolkit that supports teachers in IoT activities. The kit combines the microcontroller with relays and a web application, enabling students to connect everyday objects to the Internet and visualize the devices’ data flow. Based on an intervention in a secondary school with 3 teachers and 20 students of ages 12-13, our results indicate that the design and features of the kit — internet communication and data visualization — support teachers to engage students in learning about a holistic perspective of IoT. We reflect on our research propositions, discuss design strategies, and present three design recommendations for IoT toolkits: Connectivity, Visualization, and Openness.

Technologies based on AI/ML are playing an increasingly prominent role in teenagers’ everyday lives. Mirroring this trend is a concomitant interest in teaching young people about intelligent technologies. Whereas previous research in the field of Child–Computer Interaction has proposed curriculum and learning activities that describe what teenagers need to learn about AI/ML, there is still a shortage of studies which specifically address teenager-centered perspectives in the teaching of AI/ML. This paper presents a study of teenagers’ everyday understanding of AI/ML technologies. Using a thematic analysis of the teenagers’ own explanations during a series of workshops, we present a conceptual map of the teenagers’ understandings of these technologies. We go on to propose five general recommendations for the teaching of AI/ML to teenagers through the lens of Computational Empowerment. Taken together, these recommendations serve as a teenage-centered starting point for teaching young people about intelligent technologies, an approach that can be implemented in future research interventions with similar objectives.

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Children grow up in a data economy but grasping how their data are part of this eco-system and how data become valuable to others can be difficult. This work explores how to design tools and activities which support children’s critical data literacy for K-9 education. We bring together two strands of work; First, insights from a co-design process where teachers and researchers designed tools and activities for teaching critical data literacy which they deployed in a lower secondary education classroom. Second, insights from didactic theories from maths and computer science education about working with multiple and rich representations of complex and intangible phenomena. Based on this we contribute three principles for enriching pupils’ relationship to data in order to inform future research into how pupils can be scaffolded in forming richer relationships to the data-driven technologies in their everyday lives in order to retain agency in a data-driven world.

In this pictorial, we present an approach to using documentation as a means to enable learners and facilitators to recognize and reflect on learning. We build on an approach developed by the Reggio Emilia network of schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. We share our iterative design and describe our approach where facilitators documented families’ experiences making and tinkering with construction kits such as Scratch and Makey Makey. Facilitators then reflected on, curated, and shared documentation with families. We illustrate this approach with documentation from three families. We conclude with reflections on what these visuals of learning afford for interaction design.

In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and limitations that emerge when we engage youth and their families in creating and sharing stories with a computational construction kit, specifically the ScratchJr programming environment. We examine the participation of children and their families in the Family Creative Learning program, a culturally responsive computing context that engages families to create and share stories with computing. Our findings highlight the ways that families discovered new possibilities for their storytelling using the computational construction kit, but they also experienced challenges in representing their stories and themselves. We discuss the opportunities in storytelling with construction kits and possible limitations when designing to support expression, especially among groups historically marginalized from computing spaces.

This Ph.D. project takes a Participatory Design approach to address the research question how design fiction and constructionist approaches support the understanding of Emerging Technologies’ societal implications in formal education for 14 - 16 year old students? The main contribution will be new learning experiences in secondary schools that support children's critical and constructive engagement with emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and Machine Learning. The thesis leverages theoretical strands within Child-Computer Interaction on constructionism and design fiction to combine hands-on learning and technological imagination. Preliminary results from Participatory Design interventions (Fall 2020) indicate that the combination of constructionism and design fiction provides a beneficial methodological framework for supporting children's understanding of societal implications of emerging technologies while also gaining a deeper understanding of the technology fundamentals.

In this paper, we describe an exploratory study of how design fiction can be used to introduce machine learning (ML) to 14-15 year old students in an engaging way. The study describes three sessions conducted online that combined hands-on and design fiction activities related to supervised ML, focusing on facial analysis. Based on semi-structured interviews and field notes, we discuss how the design fiction approach seemed to be engaging and supportive for students' reflection on their relationship with technology. In future work, we will expand the study to include a larger number of students, assess their learning, and further explore connections between ML and its societal implications.

Many toys and kits have been developed to help cultivate computational thinking in young children in the past decade. However, a majority of these kits ask children to move a robot/character around a limited space, constraining what could otherwise be generative and creative learning experiences into pre-defined activities and challenges with uniform outcomes. How can we expand what children can program and how they can create code? In this work, we present CodeAttach, a learning kit designed to engage young children in computational thinking through physical play activities. CodeAttach consists of three parts: (1) an interactive hardware device, (2) a mobile application to program the device, and (3) supporting materials for different play activities. With CodeAttach, children can attach the device to the supporting materials or other everyday objects to create their own props for physical play. The device offers different inputs and outputs and supports children to change the rules of existing physical activities or create new activities by programming this device. We outline the principles guiding the design of CodeAttach, its initial development process, and insights from early playtest with young kids and expert researchers.

Creative learning kits are physical, low-cost and easy to fabricate materials that support creative learning experiences. The kits were designed to be used in the context of physical microworlds: environments that support learning through the making of personally meaningful projects. Since the microworlds were first proposed by Seymour Papert in the 1980s, implementations of microworlds tend to use primarily technology-based kits that require high-end materials like computers. In low-resourced settings, what might the possibilities be to implement this approach using primarily low-cost and familiar materials? To explore these questions, we present the design of four physical, low-cost kits: Creature Creature Creation Kit, Interior Design Kit, Wearable Kit, and Automata Kit.