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.

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.