Children today encounter social issues—climate change, conflict, inequality—through digital technologies, and the design of that encounter shapes whether young people move toward lasting civic engagement or toward anxiety and withdrawal. Much of the content children see is optimized for attention through fear and urgency, with few pathways toward meaningful action—contributing to rising distress and disengagement among young people who care deeply but feel powerless to act. This half-day workshop introduces “sustainable care” as a design lens, asking how technology might support children’s sustained engagement with social causes without contributing to empathic distress or burnout. We invite researchers and practitioners across child-computer interaction, games, education, and youth mental health to map this landscape together and develop a research agenda for the CCI community.

AI technologies have become increasingly embedded in children’s lives. While there are many frameworks for designing AI technologies for children’s well-being, few have been tested against the tensions children experience when using AI across different global contexts. This workshop explores how to design AI technologies that enhance children’s digital well-being in accordance with various developmental and child-computer interaction frameworks, as well as what developers and designers should consider as they do so. Our goal is to convene an interdisciplinary international community to pave the way for future research and practice that seeks to design AI technologies with children’s well-being in mind.

Background: Prior research argues that positive learning environments support student learning, belonging, and the desire to continue learning. In order to create joyful learning environments, we must first study what characterizes such learning spaces. However, prior research has not yet asked students what makes CS learning environments joyful. Objective: In this study, we sought to understand students’ joyful experiences in secondary CS classrooms and the elements of the learning environments that fostered those experiences. Method: We interviewed 8 students who had joyful CS experiences about those experiences, the environments in which they occured, and about the pedagogies their teachers used. We then interviewed 5 of their teachers to better understand the environments and pedagogies that cultivated joyful CS experiences. Findings: We found 4 elements in common in each student’s experience: teachers worked to relate to students, prioritize a relationship with learning, frame CS with purpose, and reify a joyful CS experience. Implications: These findings offer the opportunity for researchers and educators to reconsider pedagogies and design learning environments that engender joyful CS experiences for students. This will better enable students to build relationships with CS.

Artificial intelligence's (AI) increasing presence in children's daily lives requires careful consideration of its impacts on children's digital well-being.This workshop aims to examine different contexts where children are interacting with AI to explore design guidelines that support youth digital well being, and ways educators and caregivers could identify these supportive tools.Our goal is to convene an interdisciplinary community of researchers, industry professionals, and experts in AI and child well-being to pave the way for future research and practice that seeks to design AI technologies with children's well-being in mind.

Prior research links teens’ social media use to a reduction in their sense of well-being. The current study investigates how design mediates this link, with an overarching goal of designing better social media experiences for teens. We conducted a mixed-method study with teens (N=25, Mage= 16.5 years) to investigate their moment-by-moment experiences and emotional states while using Instagram. Our analysis showed that teens’ experiences on Instagram often entailed sifting through a content soup dominated by uninteresting, irrelevant content. Boredom served as a reason to enter Instagram, a justification to leave, and as a dominant feeling during a session. The promise of social connection was the main motivator for teens to use Instagram. Teens developed strategies to maintain a state of emotional equilibrium as they sought moments of connection with friends: (1) Feed gatekeeping, (2) Backpedaling away from negative content, (3) Choosing to hide like-counts, and (4) Avoiding notification whiplash.

Emerging technologies, among them generative AI, are continuously being integrated into the mundane fabric of young people’s lives and routines. Recently, scholars called to expand computing education beyond learning to use and create with technologies to think critically and ethically about their potential impacts as a means to encourage the development of a sense of computational empowerment. My research aims to explore this space and opportunities which encourage ethical thinking with youth - specifically adolescents - on and about generative AI, a recent emerging innovation. This exploration will take inspiration from previous work pointing to the efficacy of practices from the field of Philosophy for Children (P4C) as well as recent work pointing to the potential of eliciting ethical thinking through a critical reflection and making framework, and suggest a novel framework to elicit a sense of computational empowerment as youth grow up in our digital world.

Background: The growing complexity of the impacts of computing technologies on adolescents’ lives requires them to make similarly complex decisions around technology, fueling a rise in education efforts to look at the ethical implications of these advancements with young people. Though prior computing ethics education efforts integrate ethical perspectives, they have rarely drawn from scholarship on how to teach ethics and philosophy.

With the growing awareness of emerging technologies' impacts on teens' lives, families, and communities, rethinking the ways in which we educate and talk about these innovations and their moral and ethical complexities are gaining steam. We present a novel pedagogical intervention that blends techniques from Philosophy for Children (P4C), a pedagogical approach that teaches youth reasoning and argumentative skills, with Youth as Philosophers of Technology, a framework for computing education that foregrounds learning how to decode and unmake tech's relationship with power through artistic, moral and humanistic inquiry, without devaluing core computing practices, such as design, making, coding, and tinkering. We studied this intervention in a summer elective class with 12 students ages 14--18 in the US. Our ongoing data analysis revealed two categories of themes: (1) 'launchpads for ethical sensemaking', namely instances when we observed ethical sensemaking around technology, and (2) 'expressions of ethical sensemaking', namely what students' ethical sensemaking looked like when discussing the ethical implications of technology. We hope to catalyze discussions for both researchers on characterizations of and growth around ethical sensemaking of technology, as well as practitioners on implementations of Youth as Philosophers of Technology and P4C ideas in their classrooms.

Prior research indicates that many adolescents struggle to use social media intentionally, with negative impacts on well-being. This presents an important but under-researched opportunity to improve youth well-being through interaction design. We developed Locus, a mobile application that shapes adolescents’ entry experiences into the social media apps on their phones by prompting them to reflect on their social media intentions before they open an app and at the end of the day. In designing Locus, we combined psychology theories—to identify design targets—with co-design approaches—to design around these targets for youth's lived experiences. Following co-design work with nine teens (Mage=15.7 years), we conducted an open trial field deployment (N = 54; Mage=16.2 years) to explore how Locus was used and experienced by adolescents during their daily lives. Results provide preliminary evidence that in-the-moment interventions for self-regulation skills can support adolescents’ intentional social media use.

To gain deeper insight into how the creators of children’s technology operationalize child well-being, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 industry professionals who create child-centered interactive technologies, including platforms, content, and policies. Interviewees’ descriptions of well-being clustered into four hierarchical categories, focusing on creating experiences that were: 1) safe, 2) usable, 3) educational, and 4) meaningful. We found that organizational culture influenced designers’ self-reported ability to create child-centered products, and companies with a culture that explicitly prioritized child well-being and drew on input from experts were able to scaffold even novice employees in attending to child users’ developmental needs. Finally, we found that companies struggled to define product metrics that reflected the full continuum of child well-being and often fell back on simplistic measures like engagement and download counts. We contribute a framework outlining current industry conceptualizations of designing for child well-being, with the depth of well-being support mapped to one axis and respect for children’s agency mapped to the other.

Prior research has investigated children’s perceptions of algorithmic bias, but provides little guidance on engaging children in conversations on algorithmic bias that center their agency and well-being. To address this, we developed discussions and design activities based on three scenarios of algorithmic (un)fairness. We conducted these discussions and activities with 16 children (ages 8-12) in the US, and examined our data using qualitative thematic analysis. Grounded in lived experiences and situated knowledge, participants were capable of reasoning around both explicit and implicit effects of algorithmic bias. Participants also expressed distrust of technology, doubting technology’s abilities and preferring human approaches to resolve unfairness. This work contributes (1) a more nuanced understanding of children’s situated reasoning of technology, suggesting their potential for critical engagement and (2) a blueprint for engaging children in scaffolded yet open-ended sensemaking around algorithmic fairness, informing the design of tools, curricula, and other learning experiences for children.