Generative AI is increasingly shaping social media dynamics and the production of viral content, particularly among younger audiences. One recent example is Italian Brainrot, a meme phenomenon characterized by AI-generated, surreal visuals and absurd narratives, which has rapidly gained popularity among adolescents. Despite its widespread presence online, little is known about how such AI-generated content is perceived by young users and communicated across generational lines. This study investigates the attitudes and perceptions of 89 adolescents aged 12 − 14 regarding Italian Brainrot and related content. Specifically, it addresses two research questions: (1) How do young adolescents perceive and engage with the Italian Brainrot phenomenon? and (2) How do they communicate about this content with peers and adults? Our findings contribute to broader discussions on generative AI, internet language, and intergenerational communication. In particular, we highlight both the barriers and opportunities for fostering critical awareness and responsible engagement with AI-driven media among youth.

Gamification has been widely applied in educational contexts to enhance students' motivation and engagement. Its effectiveness has been shown to vary based on individual user preferences, such as age, gender, and player type. This study investigates the relationship between player types and user experience in StandByMe, a gamified educational platform designed to raise awareness about gender-based violence. A total of 61 high school students used the platform for about 35 minutes and completed a user experience questionnaire and the Hexad scale for player types. Results indicate that Free spirits reported higher motivation and overall user experience, while Achievers exhibited lower engagement, possibly due to a lack of clearly structured challenges. Socializers and Disruptors showed no significant relation with user experience. Additionally, demographic factors such as age and gender were related to participants' fun levels and perception of challenge. These findings highlight how users' player type predicts the user experience of a gameful system and should be considered during the design phase. Future research should explore adaptive gamification approaches and specific design modifications to enhance user experience across all player types, both within the StandByMe platform and, more broadly, in gameful systems for the education of sensitive topics.

Gamification is a widely embraced strategy in education, employed to enhance motivation and foster effective learning outcomes. However, its application to sensitive topics has been scarcely explored and remains a subject of debate. While gamification holds the potential to elevate engagement and motivation in the learning process, it also introduces certain limitations, such as the risk of trivializing the subject matter and diverting attention from the core content. This paper delves into an investigation, supported by both a literature review and a survey conducted among professionals, focusing on the implementation of gamification mechanisms in child sexual abuse education. By examining insights gathered from prior research and engaging with experts, the paper identifies key facets of gamification mechanisms in the design of educational interventions addressing child sexual abuse and related topics. The aim is to contribute to a nuanced understanding and effective utilization of gamification when addressing sensitive topics in education, offering preliminary guidelines for practitioners.

Gender-based violence is widely recognized as a significant societal issue, necessitating a concerted effort to raise awareness about its manifestations and consequences. Serious games have been often used to address the topic, particularly among the younger population. On the other hand, the use of gamification (i.e., integrating game elements to enhance user engagement with the subject) to raise awareness of gender-based violence remains unexplored. To address this gap, we developed a gamified platform aimed at raising awareness of gender-based violence and in particular of the role of gender stereotypes, in young adults. This paper presents the findings of our preliminary mixed-methods evaluation and a comparison between two versions of the platform: one employing cooperative gamification, and the other one based on an individual game modality. While the quantitative results indicate that the current platform may not be sufficient to have a positive effect in participants’ awareness of gender-based violence and attitudes toward bystander behavior, qualitative analyses yield crucial insights into participants’ positive evaluation of the cooperative mode. These analyses provide valuable information for future developments of the platform, and contribute to the exploration of gamification applied to sensitive topics.

In the post-digital world, educators are tasked with navigating a plethora of resources to build effective interventions for ever-changing skill requirements. Intelligent systems can assist them by recommending educational content, providing personalized learning experiences and automating time-consuming tasks, allowing educators to focus on creating engaging and interactive learning experiences. However, it is also important that educators are equipped to fruitfully engage with such systems in a way that enhances their pedagogy and teaching practices as far as help them to deal with societal challenges. The project ENCORE aims to support this shift by developing an intelligent system that selects quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support the pedagogical design and teaching around key skills affected by societal macro-trends, i.e. Green, Digital and Entrepreneurial (GDE) skills. The project has two phases: a data-driven phase using Natural Language Processing to match skills with relevant OERs and a qualitative/expert-driven phase for developing pedagogical guidelines and testing the system in real educational contexts. This paper describes the main tenets of the ENCORE project and the research actions taken to support learners and educators in using OERs and targeting skills most relevant to the new macro-trends of digitalization, climate change, and post-COVID economic recovery challenges.

In the evolving landscape of educational tools, Open Educational Resources (OERs) represent a wave of innovation and accessibility, offering open access materials to spread knowledge. However, their application faces several challenges, particularly in their usability and integration. The ENCORE project addresses these challenges by introducing a new workflow for the sharing and creation of OERs, which includes the collaboration on and definition of key technological components. A central feature of this approach is the development of a meta-model that standardizes OER structures, thereby improving their discoverability and ease of sharing. Additionally, the project proposes a Generative AI service designed to generate assessment activities based on these OERs. This integrated approach, combining the meta-model and workflow, seeks to seamlessly connect the discovery and use of resources, fostering an engaged and collaborative environment for OERs.

This Work in Progress paper introduces the design of an innovative educational system that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address challenges in physics education. The primary objective is to create a system that dynamically adapts to the individual needs and preferences of students while maintaining user-friendliness for teachers, allowing them to tailor their teaching methods. The emphasis is on fostering motivation and engagement, achieved through the implementation of a gamified virtual environment and a strong focus on personalization. Our aim is to develop a system capable of autonomously generating learning activities and constructing effective learning paths, all under the supervision and interaction of teachers. The generation of learning activities is guided by educational taxonomies that delineate and categorize the cognitive processes involved in these activities. The proposed educational system seeks to address challenges identified by Physics Education Research (PER), which offers valuable insights into how individuals learn physics and provides strategies to enhance the overall quality of physics education. Our specific focus revolves around two crucial aspects: concentrating on the conceptual understanding of physics concepts and processes, and fostering knowledge integration and coherence across various physics topics. These aspects are deemed essential for cultivating enduring knowledge and facilitating practical applications in the field of physics.

This paper presents key aspects that designers and Human–Computer Interaction practitioners might encounter when designing multimodal interaction for older adults, focusing on the trade-offs that might occur as part of the design process. The paper gathers literature on multimodal interaction and assistive technology, and describes a set of design challenges specific for older users. Building on these main design challenges, four trade-offs in the design of multimodal technology for this target group are presented and discussed. To highlight the relevance of the trade-offs in the design process of multimodal technology for older adults, two of the four reported trade-offs are illustrated with two user studies that investigate mid-air and speech-based interaction with a tablet device. The first study explores the design trade-offs related to redundant multimodal commands in older, middle-aged and younger adults, whereas the second one investigates the design choices related to the definition of a set of mid-air one-hand gestures and voice input commands for older adults. Further reflections highlight the design trade-offs that such considerations bring in the process, providing an overview of the design choices involved and of their potential consequences.

The COVID-19 emergency has posed many challenges to the worldwide school system leading to school closures and massive adoption of distance education. These events affected not only the way education is delivered but also the overall school community’s wellbeing and cohesion. In this paper, we present a playful education platform originally designed to promote sustainable mobility in schools that has been adapted to support distance learning and community engagement during the health emergency. In the original version of the platform, the home-school distances traveled by students with sustainable means contributed to the advancement of the whole class in a collective virtual trip associated with playful learning material. Conversely, in a revised version of the platform adapted to the new context, students could advance in the virtual trip by reporting the good deeds performed at home. Findings from 161 questionnaires completed by teachers, families, and students, as well as results from online workshops with students, and the analysis of log files at the end of the school year revealed the opportunities and limitations of converting a playful activity conceived for being experienced in class into an online activity to be completed at home. The results show that the adapted version contributed to the school community cohesion and provided a positive experience to all its members, even though it was not able to completely overcome the generalized feeling of isolation. This paper contributes to understanding the social value of collaborative and playful digital activities that involve the entire school community, showing how technology can impact education and support communities in times of crisis.

This work explores how comic-based digital storytelling can support primary school children in reflecting on situations involving conflict in the classroom. In particular, we focus on investigating three specific aspects: (1) the potential of digital story composition conducted collaboratively or individually, (2) the children's perception on the use of digital storytelling for reflecting on conflicts that might arise in class and, (3) the teachers' experience of introducing a digital tool for collaborative storytelling and comics composition in an educational context. In this paper, we explored these aspects by developing a case study. A class of 12 children and 2 teachers explore the use of a digital tool, named Communics, aimed at creating digital narratives individually and collaboratively. The results show that digital narratives created from collaborative storytelling are longer, more structured, and richer with meaning compared to stories from individual work. Moreover, it emerged that children prefer to work collaboratively, even if it meant compromising, going slower and waiting for their turn. Finally, teachers appreciated the collaborative use of Communics, and in particular, the turn-based feature as children can practice the narrative re-elaboration with a peer while waiting for their turn.

Joint narratives are often used in the context of reconciliation interventions for people in social conflict situations, which arise, for example, due to ethnic or religious differences. The interventions aim to encourage a change in attitudes of the participants towards each other. Typically, a human mediator is fundamental for achieving a successful intervention. In this work, we present an automated approach to support remote interactions between pairs of participants as they contribute to a shared story in their own language. A key component is an automated cognitive tutor that guides the participants through a controlled escalation/de-escalation process during the development of a joint narrative. We performed a controlled study comparing a trained human mediator to the automated mediator. The results demonstrate that an automated mediator, although simple at this stage, effectively supports interactions and helps to achieve positive outcomes comparable to those attained by the trained human mediator.

In this paper, we describe a pilot study of a digital storytelling project conducted with primary school children. The study investigates how comic-based storytelling supported by a digital tool, named Communics, can facilitate primary school children in creating stories and in reflecting on situations involving discrimination within the classroom context. In a first stage, two teachers have been involved to negotiate the intervention, as well as define graphical and textual content on which to base the narrations in Communics. In a second stage, we piloted an intervention within a class of 12 children to investigate the scaffolding opportunities offered by Communics as well as different aspects of storytelling, as engagement and motivation, and explore the use of the storytelling practice as a reflective process. Finally, we discuss preliminary insights and suggestions for future studies.

Technology increasingly offers parents more and more opportunities to monitor children, reshaping the way control and autonomy are negotiated within families. This paper investigates the views of parents and primary school children on mobile technology designed to support child independent mobility in the context of the local walking school buses. Based on a school-year long field study, we report findings on children's and parents' experience with proximity detection devices. The results provide insights into how the parents and children accepted and socially appropriated the technology into the walking school bus activity, shedding light on the way they understand and conceptualize a technology that collects data on children's proximity to the volunteers' smartphone. We discuss parents' needs and concerns toward monitoring technologies and the related challenges in terms of trust-control balance. These insights are elaborated to inform the future design of technology for child independent mobility.

In this paper, we present a playful digital activity for primary school classrooms that promotes sustainable and active mobility by leveraging the daily journey to school into a collaborative educational experience. In the class game, stretches of distance travelled in a sustainable way by each child contributes to the advancement of the whole school on a collective virtual trip. During the trip, several virtual stops are associated with the discovery of playful learning material. The approach has been evaluated in a primary school with 87 pupils and 6 teachers actively involved in the learning activity for 12 continuous weeks. The findings from the questionnaires with parents and the interviews with teachers show a positive effect in terms of children's behavioural change as well as educational value. Indications on the use of class and school collaborative gamification activities for supporting sustainable behavioural change are discussed.

Crowdsourcing for addressing environmental challenges is a promising area in HCI research. This work investigates participation in a crowdsourcing initiative that combined a social-purpose activity with the interest of a company to crowdsource a labour-intensive task. The initiative was based on the deployment of a mobile application for pro-environmental data collection, namely collecting data about weight and type of product packaging. We report the results of a 9-month study conducted within a living lab that involved 96 customers of a large retail store. The analysis of usage logs and patterns of behaviour show different user categories: constant, sprinter and casual users. A survey was conducted to compare those categories as far as demographics, personality traits and usability metrics are concerned. Ten follow-up interviews further investigated motivations behind different usage patterns. The results provide insights on different types of contributors, reporting evidence on what motivated committed and less committed participants.

Since they can integrate a wide range of interactive modalities, multimodal interfaces are considered to improve accessibility for a variety of users, including older adults. However, only few works have actually explored how older adults approach multimodal interaction outside specific contexts and have done so mainly in comparison to much younger users. This study explores how older (65+ years old), middle-aged (55-65 years old) and younger adults (25-35 years old) use mobile multimodal interaction in an everyday activity (i.e. taking photos with a tablet) by using midair gestures and voice commands, and investigates the differences and similarities between the considered age groups. Preliminary findings from a video-analysis show that all groups easily combine the proposed modalities when interacting with a tablet device. Furthermore, compared to younger adults, older and middle-aged adults show similarities in the way they perform gesture and voice commands.

Drawing on concepts from theories on persuasion, social psychology, and philosophy of language, this article presents the design of an ambient persuasive system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting a balanced flow of communication in group conversational activity. The system includes two main components: (a) a context-awareness system that monitors group member non-verbal behavior, and (b) a visualization component that promotes balanced participation, providing targeted directives to participants through peripheral displays. In two empirical studies, a strategy for influencing participant social dynamics based on subtle directives in the form of aesthetically pleasant visual animations was assessed. The findings provide insight on the effect, the acceptability, and the perceived influence of subtle peripheral persuasive messages for ambient displays. The studies indicate that when the participants understand the message intention, the subtle directives have a positive influence on group behavior, and are considered more appealing and less intrusive than overt, language-based messages. Furthermore, it was found that personality traits influenced attitudes towards the system.

Children with reading difficulties face several obstacles in learning to fluently read written material. Multimedia applications integrating text-to-speech (TTS) synthesisers are valuable tools for supporting reading activities. The paper presents GARY, an application that combines TTS synthesis with eye tracking. GARY is meant to be used on a tablet device coupled with an eye tracker. Making use of the information from reader's eye movement, the system allows users to adapt the speed rate of the synthesised voice to their pace of reading. The paper describes the system, its functioning and future steps in designing a tool for supporting readers' ability in making the connection between the sounds heard and the letters read.

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to compare two ways of influencing participantsfi social dynamics: overt directives, explicit recommendations of social actions displayed in the form of text; or subtle directives, where the same recommendations are provided in an implicit manner. Our study indicates that, when the participants understand how the implicit messages work, the subtle facilitation is regarded as more useful than the overt one and it is considered to more positively influence the group behavior.