The BBC micro:bit is a pocket-sized, battery-powered device that introduces students to coding and computational thinking through the lens of physical computing. It can be incorporated in a variety of interactive projects and combined with a range of commercially available accessories. These include display shields that support richer user interaction with the micro:bit via a small colour screen and additional button inputs.

With childhood increasingly mediated by AI and marked by children’s heightened vulnerabilities, critical reflection emerges as a vital tool for both understanding and strengthening children’s ethical reasoning, steering them between uncritical adoption and blanket pessimism about AI. As such, we present outcomes of a study with 66 children (aged 10-11) wherein we trace what children attend to and how they perceive AI ethics. Aligned with UNESCO’s ethical principles for AI, we utilised 10 design fiction scenarios set in familiar contexts to prompt reflection. Mixed-methods data showed that children’s perceptions skewed towards caution; ethical concerns were also distributed unevenly across principles, indicating where AI ethics literacy may need targeted scaffolding. This work contributes to HCI by highlighting the complexity of children’s perceptions and showing how speculative, reflection-based methods can shift children’s ethical considerations about AI, with three recommendations for AI ethics literacy education that the HCI community should consider in future.

Generative AI's growing use in content creation significantly impacts societal perceptions by perpetuating and reinforcing gender stereotypes.The amplification of stereotypes in AI-generated content can lead to increased discrimination, exclusion, misinformation, and contribute to racial and gender disparities.To address this challenge, we explore the direct impact of generative AI on gender attribution and stereotype reinforcement in digital imagery through a survey with 111 participants, analysing interpretations of gender expression in 216 AI-generated images.Findings reveal a pronounced bias toward masculine-leaning attributions, particularly in images where gender identity is labelled as androgyne.This research provides three key contributions: (1) an in-depth understanding of how people perceive gender expressions in AI-generated images; (2) a dataset of 216 images evaluated by participants for masculinity, femininity, and neutrality; and (3) two key challenges to consider in order to address the stereotyped representations of gender expressions in AI-generated content, highlighting the need for more inclusive AI practices.

The increasing adoption of generative AI raises concerns regarding its potential to reinforce gender stereotypes, especially in content aimed at children.AI-generated images that reflect traditional gender roles can inadvertently influence children's perceptions, embedding unconscious biases.Through co-design sessions with domain experts, we developed a child-friendly generative AI web application designed with dual purpose: (1) analysing children's choices to determine potential underlying bias and whether children's own gender identity influences these choices, and (2) investigating if specific non-aesthetic traits prompt the AI to produce characters with stereotypical presentations.

The proliferation of Generative AI (GenAI) has created a need for effective tools and strategies that teach young people how to use and think about these technologies. This paper presents work in progress extending a successful trial of an AI-focused constructionist learning package, which included a proprietary GenAI tool, lesson plans, and supplementary teaching resources. To explore the scalability of this approach, we interviewed education practitioners. In these discussions they reflected on findings from the initial trial to identify potential challenges and opportunities for broader implementation. From these insights, we propose a set of design heuristics for designing scalable GenAI education platforms.

In an increasingly data-driven world, a core set of data literacy skills are needed to enable individuals and society collectively to make informed decisions. In this experience report we present the Toolkit for Educators of Data Science, a novel combination of hardware and software that empowers children in K-12 to experience the data science lifecycle by collecting, analysing, and visualising their own local environmental data. Through exploratory studies in two classrooms involving five teachers and 100 children aged 7 to 11, we experienced the following. (1) Collecting live data from the local environment with our tools provided children with high levels of agency, engagement and focus, (2) Educators stated how using the technology gave the data purpose and gave students a new perception and experience of computing; data started to have meaning because of the real world application across the curriculum. (3) The offline, standalone design of our toolkit empowers teachers by overcoming practical issues often associated with delivering data science lessons in schools.

Generative AI technologies demand new practical and critical competencies, which call on design to respond to and foster these. We present an exploratory study guided by Research-through-Design, in which we partnered with a primary school to develop a constructionist curriculum centered on students interacting with a generative AI technology. We provide a detailed account of the design of and outputs from the curriculum and learning materials, finding centrally that the reflexive and prolonged ‘hands-on’ approach led to a co-development of students’ practical and critical competencies. From the study, we contribute guidance for designing constructionist approaches to generative AI technology education; further arguing to do so with ‘critical responsivity.’ We then discuss how HCI researchers may leverage constructionist strategies in designing interactions with generative AI technologies; and suggest that Research-through-Design can play an important role as a ‘rapid response methodology’ capable of reacting to fast-evolving, disruptive technologies such as generative AI.

The integration of social robots into children’s environments is becoming increasingly pertinent, spanning from entertainment to health care. Although prior studies highlight the role of morphology in shaping children’s perceptions of these machines, there is little research to examine their perceptions of social robots in various contexts. Our research investigates how different morphologies (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic) influence children’s emotional responses. We involved 36 children (9-11 years old) in a design fiction-based study examining how morphology impacts children’s hopes and fears of social robots in varying scenarios and contexts, categorising the results into four distinct themes that represent children’s general perceptions (autonomy, cognition, socio-emotional, and physical). From this, we identify two distinct design challenges, and discuss how these may impact both researchers general users of social robots with children. Further, we emphasise the need for careful and considerate deployment of social robots for children in both research and real-world applications.

The influence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the propagation and amplification of societal biases, particularly in the context of children’s content creation, is a growing concern. By developing and testing a prototype tool designed to assist children in Digital Storytelling (DST), our research aimed to explore and mitigate the propagation of stereotypes through the use of a character-generating AI tool utilising Stable Diffusion. Despite initial aspirations, the tool demonstrated significant biases inherent in the underlying AI model, leading to the decision against its use by children. The findings we discovered contribute to a broader discourse on the development of ethical AI and its use, advocating for a more responsible and inclusive approach to technological innovation in the context of children’s digital media consumption and creation.

This workshop will bring together researchers and educators to imagine a future of low-cost, widely-available digital making for children, both within the STEAM classroom and beyond. In particular, we are interested in expanding the reach of digital making with programmable microcontrollers (such as Arduino, the BBC micro:bit, etc.) to underrepresented children in the STEAM fields, which includes historically excluded or marginalized children as well as those lacking access to computers and/or the Internet. Participants will report on their experience helping children learn about digital technology while creating wearables, robotics, environmental sensors and more. Participants who submit a position paper or work-in-progress report will have an opportunity to present their work and ideas. From these presentations, we will select emerging themes to discuss.

This paper introduces a hands-on workshop centered on participatory design (PD) approaches tailored for engaging young children, with a special focus on failures, challenges, and successes in prior experiences within the child-computer interaction (CCI) domain. Although previous efforts have highlighted the advantages of engaging young children in PD, research has overlooked their involvement as co-designers, leading to a lack of exploration and understanding of their unique perspectives and challenges in the design process. Through an interactive session and collaborative activities, this workshop will facilitate discussions surrounding challenges, successes, and lessons learned through PD with young children. By evaluating and exchanging experiences, we aim to enhance our understanding of PD and refine its methodologies for this particular population. By synthesizing the shortcomings, difficulties, and successes of past experiences, the workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to initiate efforts toward closing this research gap. Together we will establish the groundwork for enhanced approaches and a deeper understanding of how to involve young children in PD, which will enhance future efforts in the field of CCI.

Physical computing has emerged as an effective approach to introducing computing and coding to students. One of the most popular enabling tools is the BBC micro:bit, well-known for its positive impact on teaching programming and driving engagement in the classroom. We extend these benefits by developing a new approach to coding with micro:bit: MicroCode. Unlike other experiences, MicroCode couples the micro:bit with a low-cost handheld accessory to enable live and portable programming via an on-device visual programming language; no separate host computer is needed. We present the design of MicroCode and the findings of a study in which we interviewed five primary school teachers and 60 children aged 10-11 working with MicroCode. The outcomes of the study show that MicroCode raised children’s engagement and stimulated the development of a strong sense of agency on coding activities, while teachers felt empowered to adopt situated and cross-curricular learning approaches.

When the technology encompasses some form of intelligence or agency in the form of robots, virtual agents or artificial intelligence, understanding the reasoning behind their actions and decisions becomes an integral part of the interaction. This challenge extends beyond mere interaction to ensure these technological entities engage with children in an understandable and transparent manner. Given the current emergence of research in explainability and transparency within human-robot interaction, a noticeable gap emerges when the target population shifts to children. Several challenges have contributed to this gap, including the more difficult job of considering children’s unique cognitive and emotional needs or aligning the complexity of the technology and the developmental stages of young users. As we advance the field through generating more effective explanations or transparent behaviours in robots and agents, transitioning these advancements to more child-centric contexts demands a deeper understanding of how children perceive and comprehend technological behaviours. This workshop explores this gap and how we could tackle the critical role of developing technologies, e.g., robots, AI, and toys that are more transparent and express more explainable behaviours. We aim to initiate discussions on the importance of understanding children’s perception of different technologies and approaches to generate and evaluate explainability features that are tailored for child users interacting with autonomous agents and robots. Simultaneously, we address the challenges inherent in this context, including potential biases in explainability and the risks associated with deception in child-technology interaction.

This paper presents the ongoing development of the clip:bit, a clipboard-style micro:bit V2 extension for biodiversity monitoring in schools and community groups. The clip:bit is one component in a wider system to enable schools to engage in longitudinal studies of biodiversity in school grounds and local areas, monitoring the impact of landscape management and children's ecological activities, such as the introduction wildflower meadows or planting hedgerows. The clip:bit was designed in response to needs identified during fieldwork in schools. We describe how the design addresses these needs and point to the way the clip:bit fits into a wider plan for data management and data visualisation. We also discuss the application of an existing micro:bit peripheral, the Kitronik Game Controller, for biodiversity monitoring and compare their use for different cases.

To protect young children from online harm in the long term, a proactive approach is required. Sixty Percent intends to mitigate such risks by providing children with a mobile tool to encourage interactive reflection and critical thinking. The investigation gathers behavioural data from parents and guardians, in addition to feedback from users aged eight to eleven, for a prototype imitating a mobile application. The findings indicate there is indeed a gap in the market for mobile applications, aimed to enthuse and educate the younger generation, that shouldn't be on social media, yet still are. Children have indicated the mobile tool is an engaging method which they can exploit for knowledge and support whilst navigating cyberspace.

Gender stereotypes can be very harmful to young people as their views on the role gender plays in society can have a real impact on their future career prospects and well-being. This project addresses these issues by designing and evaluating a mobile app that has the purpose of detecting and mitigating gender-stereotypical thinking in children. ‘The Toy Shop’ app consists of three different activities that aim at making children reflect and critically think about their gender biases. We designed and tested the app with four domain experts that provide feedback to revise the app. This work aims at contributing to the current discussion on how to design technology-based experiences for children that address the issues related to gender stereotypical thinking and its consequences on children's everyday life.

Providing a good understanding to children and educators on the Internet of Things (IoT) means to make them aware about where the data goes, how it is stored, and what it is stored on. In this perspective many commercial IoT systems have been shown to be unsuitable for this purpose especially when used in an educational context. They do not create user centric data collection opportunities; many of their IoT sensors that send data offsite to an online cloud create gaps in knowledge; the sensors themselves are not transparent: it's not clear what data they are collecting and how, and they are not easily compatible with school networks. Classroom Cloudlet addresses this issue. This demonstration presents an end-to-end IoT like system that includes a mobile, tangible, and transparent classroom cloudlet. Classroom Cloudlet aims to allow data from multiple devices to be easily shared, collated and analysed without using the Internet, but while still educating students about IoT and cloud concepts. The classroom cloudlet aims to be a physical representation of a cloud in an IoT system; visualise the movement of data around the system; provide a web front-end for students to view and create custom visualisations of their data. Classroom Cloudlet aims to gives the educator and the children full control and ownership of their data.

This pictorial presents Periodic Fable (PF), an educational game's design and graphic interface that promotes a constructivist approach to engage young children with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. The game presents children with scientific content supported with an exploratory activity using physical cubes manipulable through Tangible Interaction and Augmented Reality. The game's objective is to entertain children while engaging them with the basics of chemistry and the Periodic Table. We reflect upon the combination of these immersive technologies, game-play mechanics, and aesthetics geared towards conveying accurate scientific information through a ludic and entertaining approach. The quantitative and qualitative results of a study with 20 children, showed significant positive results in the participants’ learning outcomes and engagement, thereby encouraging us to continue evaluating our design system as a tool that can promote STEM Education.

This work presents an autonomous approach that explores the dynamic generation of relaxing soundscapes for games and artistic installations. Differently from past works, this system can generate music and images simultaneously, preserving human intent and coherency. We present our algorithm for the generation of audiovisual instances and also a system based on this approach, verifying the quality of the outcomes it can produce in light of current approaches for the generation of images and music. We also instigate the discussion around the new paradigm in arts, where the creative process is delegated to autonomous systems, with limited human participation. Our user study (N=74) shows that our approach overcomes current deep learning models in terms of quality, being recognized as human production, as if the outcome were being generated out of an endless musical improvisation performance.

Gender stereotypes can harm children well being, impact on their career path an also led to discrimination behaviour. Our research aims at challenging children’s gender stereotypes and exploring how a Digital StoryTelling tool can be be designed to detect these at early age. Based on the literature review we have developed a prototype named Genderalize that aims at stimulating children’s reflection on their stereotypes. The tool was developed in a co-design process involving nine experts in children-computer interaction. The final version was tested by nine the adults stakeholders (e.g. guardians, parents, teachers). The outcomes provide thoughtful considerations on how Genderalize helped the detection of gender stereotypes by the means of a contextualised narrative and the reflective exercises. Results’ impact was limited due to the small sample, but the outcomes were very useful to move on to the next step of the project and inspire new developments.

Children often perceive abstract concepts such as chemistry as difficult, and teachers struggle to convey content knowledge in these subjects. In this pictorial, we address the need to promote the interest for chemistry in children by developing a multi-layered Augmented Reality serious game that uses storytelling, character design and game mechanics to connect and engage young audiences with chemistry: the Periodic Fable an Augmented Journey. Our contribution relies on the design and development of the system to convey content knowledge about the Periodic Table while fostering the children's interest and challenging their possible daunting perception of the domain. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study using a mixed-method approach engaging 21 young participants from a public school to assess the learning gains and the role of storytelling through levels of narrative transportation. The results show positive perception and learning outcome of chemistry, narrative transportation showcasing an opportunity for a unique form to approach chemistry using an edutainment format.

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ‘create’ scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

Children's fears and hopes regarding technology play a crucial role in influencing its development, impact, and social acceptance. Although studies investigate children's perceptions of social robots, there is a need to better understand how hopes and fears influence children's views of the future. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a study in which we explored 60 children's (aged 8-14) perceptions of social robots using ten fictional scenarios. From data analysis, we elicited four major themes that become the pillars of a model that represent children's perception of social robots (agency, comprehension, socioemotional features, and physicality). The model shows the complex and often paradoxical nature of children's acceptance (hope) and rejection (fear) of social robots in their lives. Our outcome provides the foundations of a new responsible approach in analyzing and designing social robots for children using hopes and fear as a lens.

Failures are not reported enough in the literature as the pressure of publishing successful stories has moved us away from considering that even unsuccessful stories can be equally relevant to increase knowledge in research. Analyzing failures can be a great learning opportunity for the community of researchers. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a research that investigated the challenges experienced when designing and running studies with children. The study began with a literature review which led to an inquiry focused on exploring failures within the Child-Computer Interaction community by interviewing 14 researchers. Interviews were analyzed in the vein of the thematic analysis approach. We deliver three themes (unpredictability, technology targeted at adults, children willing to achieve the goal), three action points (the context, the technology, and the activity) and a paradigm shift from “failures need to be hidden” to “failure is a learning opportunity”.

This short paper introduces Energy in Schools, an interactive platform designed to improve energy efficiency in UK schools through a combination of environmental measurement and behavioural change. Uniquely, Energy in Schools is designed to empower all the stakeholders within a school, including children, teachers and leadership groups to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions. The paper reports on the motivation and design of the platform, a discussion on how interactive materials and educational activities were developed to raise awareness and understanding of energy and the climate emergency, how children led activities were used to instrument and analyses energy use via child friendly Internet of Things technologies. Finally, an analysis of its success in encouraging behavioural change through the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a live deployment across 20 schools is presented. Overall, it was observed that encouraging multiple stakeholders to work together interactively can decrease energy consumption in the majority of schools by over 5%.

Abstract During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children’s experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and child–computer interaction by reporting the results of a study involving 107 children aged 2 to 10 years. The main purposes of this study were to discover: (1) whether an avatar (movable or immovable) provides interactions that are intuitive for children and therefore help to overcome so-called “affordance blindness”; (2) whether an avatar-based touchless interface makes children’s experiences engaging and enjoyable therefore improving recall of content provided through the interaction (learning about art). The study unveiled relevant outcomes in terms of affordance blindness and two-handed interactions. We provide evidence indicating that chronological age influences the style of child–avatar interaction. Finally, it is suggested that avatars could facilitate the development of new effective educational technologies for young children.

The concept of gamified interactive models and its novel extensions, such as playification, has been widely approached in order to engage users in many fields. In fields such as HCI and AI, however, these approaches were not yet employed for supporting users to create different forms of artworks, like a musical corpus. While allowing novel forms of interactivity with partially-autonomous systems, these techniques could also foster the emergence of artworks not limited to experts. Hence, in this paper we introduce the concept of meta-interactivity for compositional interfaces, which extends an individual's capabilities by the translation of an effort into a proficiency. We present how this approach can be effective through a novel system that enables non-experts to compose coherent musical pieces through the use of imagetic elements in a virtual environment. We conduct experiments with a population of musical experts and non-experts, showing that non-experts were able to learn and create high-quality musical productions through our interactive approach.

Gender stereotyping in child development and education is a known issue but as yet little attention has been given to the design for change, or at least attenuate, stereotypical thinking. In our research we explored how Digital StoryTelling (DST) could support children in their awareness of negative gender stereotypes. Following a participatory design-inspired approach we involved 43 participants; children and adults (teachers and experts in the domain), in three workshops with the purpose of exploring this design space. Here, we describe this full process and its outcomes: nine concepts to guide the design of a DST tool. The workflow and toolbox used during the process are instances of an approach that could be replicated in other contexts and/or to challenge other types of stereotypes. The main contribution of our research is towards the design for change with and for children. We hope that our work will inspire members of our community to address these issues.

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.

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research question: how can gender stereotypes be detected in the stories produced by children with Digital StoryTelling? We addressed this issue by analyzing 23 multimedia stories created by 83 children, aged 11-12 years. The main contribution of our work is an evaluation methodology to detect gender stereotypes.

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.

In the paper we describe an exploration into the design of an authoring tool to support the creation of multimedia stories. We explicitly targeted children with no reading or writing skills and their educators. Children in this age group often enjoy reading and creating stories together with adults and in so doing develop important pre-literacy skills. Literature suggests that when children play an active role in these activities, with a high level of engagement and interaction, there is a significant increase in their vocabulary acquisition and an improvement in their communication skills. Thus, we investigated these issues by conducting an explorative study in a pre-school class with fifteen children and three teachers. Here, we describe the emerging challenges and provide design directions for an authoring system to support the co-creation of stories for pre-literate children.

This workshop explores the many roles children can play in the design of technology for their own use. Much literature has reported on how children have been mainly playing co-designer roles. By looking closer it emerges that children have mostly been involved in the ideation phase of design. More rarely were they actively engaged in other design phases e.g. conducting Contextual Inquiry, elaborating User Data Analysis, producing Personas, preparing Sketches and Story Boards and crafting Low and High resolution Prototypes. When it comes to evaluation, children are still mostly considered as final users while only rarely are they invited to run heuristic evaluations or even to have a more active role during the process. We would like to invite all relevant stakeholders: researchers, teachers, parents, and of course children, to share their experiences. The purpose of the workshop is also to bring their open questions and requests for guidelines and suggestions as to when and how to involve children in the various process stages. We hope to produce good definitions of the many roles children can play as co-researchers as well as to explore the benefits each participant will get from engaging with the overall design experience.

This paper describes the findings of a study into how children engage with and enjoy reading digital stories. We considered stories created by children with an application called Fiabot! that we designed to support the creation of multimedia fairy tales in school. We asked a group of 25 volunteers, aged 9 to 12, to act as assessors and read the multimedia fairy tales with the aim of uncovering the key factors that contribute to making stories more engaging for young readers. The same stories were also previously evaluated by teachers who looked at specific quality indicators derived from the educational goals of the fairy tale making exercise. Here we report on how children and adults had very different views on what makes a story engaging. By looking at their contrasting opinions we could get a deeper understanding of the factors and dimensions of engagement that influence the overall enjoyment of a story. This paper ends by discussing how we could use these findings to design more engaging multimedia stories and enhanced eBooks that would be both educational and fun to read.

Networked public displays can stimulate interaction between members of place-based communities, e.g., through situated snapshots - photos taken through a display attached camera. Previous work pointed the need for deploying networked public display applications in various settings in order to make the findings transferable and generalizable and recommends that findings should be connected with research from community psychology. In this paper we report a 15-week "in the wild" deployment of the Moment Machine 2.0 that allowed taking situated snapshots at a university. The application's evaluation involved in-depth interviews (n=20), survey (n=119), and log file analysis. We synthesize our findings with prior work and show how certain effects transfer across settings. We show how the application affected community interaction and sense of community as defined by McMillan and Chavis. We provide implications for design of similar experiences. Overall, our work contributes to the general knowledge of common effects produced by public displays.

In this paper we describe our experience in designing an application to support children in producing their stories in a formal setting, a primary school. In particular, we reflect on the implications of our findings on levels of creativity found in the produced stories. Besides, we compare two versions of our application: one is text-based and the other is image-rich. Feedback from teachers and children is presented and discussed in terms of implications for the design. We will then use our experience to revise the existing guidelines to design authoring tools to stimulate creativity.

This paper presents the results of a cooperative inquiry study aimed at developing a prototype of enhanced eBook for leisure reading. Together with a group of 9 to 11 years old children we explored various design ideas and, starting from these ideas, we developed the eBook prototype and elaborated a shortlist of recommendations. The paper aims to extend the research on the design of children's eBooks with a set of six guidelines that are intended to help designers in creating better and more engaging eBooks.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how digital technology can be integrated into the formal education system. Within a longitudinal research study, which lasted four years, we conducted an investigation on how mobile technology can support educational activities as defined by a school curriculum. Among the topics included in the school curriculum, we focused on the literary field and developed a Digital StoryTelling (DST) application, Fiabot!, to support this activity. Here, we describe the design of the application and how we evaluated its impact on educational activities. The application was designed and evaluated in two primary schools. The study had the objectives of exploring whether Fiabot! supports children in achieving educational objectives defined by the curriculum, how this effectively supports teachers, and to what extent children like using it for the creation and sharing of their stories. Our findings show that the application has a positive impact on curriculum enactment and effectively supports the related educational activities. Overall, Fiabot! wasdemonstrated to be very effective in stimulating children's discussion of a story's plot and characters. Thus, Fiabot! supported children not only in being creative but also in organizing their work and exploring a digital media opportunity. This resulted in the development of new skills and the better grounding of previously acquired knowledge, while teachers also had the opportunity to expand their teaching skills and get a taste of ICT's potential in education.

Creativity and imagination play a key role in human learning and development. This workshop aims at promoting the discussion on interactive technologies that enhance children's creativity. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to: what is creativity in the first place, and how to design, develop and evaluate technologies that enrich children's expressive power, as well as their abilities to think "laterally" (out of the box). We seek contribution on the design of tools that encourage young people to explore differently their environment, to capture their experience of the world, to crystallize and transform these occurrences in a creative way.

This paper presents BoD Shapes, a novel authentication method for smartphones that uses the back of the device for input. We argue that this increases the resistance to shoulder surfing while remaining reasonably fast and easy-to-use. We performed a user study (n=24) comparing BoD Shapes to PIN authentication, Android grid unlock, and a front version of our system. Testing a front version allowed us to directly compare performance and security measures between front and back authentication. Our results show that BoD Shapes is significantly more secure than the three other approaches. While performance declined, our results show that BoD Shapes can be very fast (up to 1.5 seconds in the user study) and that learning effects have an influence on its performance. This indicates that speed improvements can be expected in long-term use.

In this work in progress paper we explore the many facets and activities that contribute to the definition of reading experience, in particular when considering children as readers of electronic books (eBooks). We aim at understanding the importance of reading context and book choice as part of the reading experience in order to set up the main steps of a User-Centered Design (UCD) process that will result in innovative models and interfaces for more engaging children's eBooks.

In the age of online social networks, local communities still play an essential role in supporting social cohesion. In this paper we present a study that explores the design of "interacting places" -- networked public multimedia services that foster community awareness between local members -- in the context of a student community. In order to have interacting places "fit in" with the existing communication practices of the students, we performed and analyzed a set of semi-structured interviews with n=17 students regarding their use of email, social networking services, and instant messaging to stay in touch with others. A follow-up online survey (n=76) then explored how networked public multimedia services could complement these practices. Following a "communicative ecology" approach -- a conceptual model that represents the technical, social, and discursive contexts of communication -- we draw up guidelines to support the design of both content and channels (applications) for interacting places in student communities.

This paper is about assessing how and under which conditions digital technology interactions and activities can enhance socio-cognitive abilities in children. We address this issue through a comparison between canonical and digital-based narrative activities in a formal educational setting. The paper is based upon a case study carried on in a primary school in Lugano (CH), where children develop educational narratives in both traditional and digital-assisted formats. Three are the main issues addressed: Valorization and enhancement of different capabilities, Socialization and attitude change, Pupils collaboration strategies. Copyright 2010 ACM.

In this paper, we present Wi-swing, a case study approach in designing a networked playground for children located in a public garden. The approach adopted in the case study is based on prototyping using the technique of scenario dramatization. The process of designing augmented interactive systems needs to be addressed to consider the physical, aesthetic and social aspects of interaction.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are emerging as a new paradigm of interaction with the digital world aiming at facilitating traditional GUI-based interaction. Interaction with TUIs relies on users' existing skills of interaction with the real world [9], thereby offering the promise of interfaces that are quicker to learn and easier to use. Recently it has been demonstrated [1] that the use of personal objects as tangible interfaces will be even more straightforward since users already have a mental model associated to the physical objects thus facilitating the comprehension and usage modalities of that objects. However TUIs are currently very challenging to build and this limits their widespread diffusion and exploitation. In order to address this issue we propose a user-oriented framework, called Memodules Framework, which allows the easy creation and management of Personal TUIs, providing end users with the ability of dynamically configuring and reconfiguring their TUIs. The framework is based on a model, called MemoML (Memodules Markup Language), which guarantees framework flexibility, extensibility and evolution over time.