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.

Child–Computer Interaction seeks to support young people in critically engaging with technology through the Computational Empowerment (CE) research agenda. Recently, Transformative Agency has been proposed as a framework for understanding how CE can lead to action. This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary reflections of a cross-case analysis of two middle school interventions using activism-oriented learning to foster TA. We observed that while students demonstrated strong engagement, their possibilities for action remained bounded. Learning designs both enabled and constrained participation, personal relevance supported critique but not action, and making often remained symbolic. We argue for reconnecting CE with participatory design’s political roots by designing for situated action where students can meaningfully influence their everyday sociotechnical contexts.

Design-based learning (DBL) is an educational approach frequently used in design and technology education, yet students’ value judgments underpinning design decisions often remain implicit. In this case study, we examined how a visual inquiry activity embedded in a nine-week DBL project on Sustainable Infrastructure supported values inquiry. The project was co-created with a grade 6/7 teacher and implemented with 30 students. The activity comprised a neighborhood walk to photograph infrastructure, followed by facilitated discussion, value analysis, and synthesis into a community persona and point-of-view statement that anchored later ideation and prototyping. Data included 199 photographs, artifacts, field notes, and ten interviews. Findings show how visual inquiry supported (1) infrastructural noticing, (2) recurring valuation practices (comparison, gaps, use, and social cues), and (3) translation of values into design constraints and features. We discuss implications for educational designers and educators for supporting valuation and values-to-design scaffolds in DBL.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

Design-based learning (DBL) can contribute to students' designerly well-being when enabling them to engage with the world through their own personal values and beliefs.Reflecting on and incorporating personally meaningful human values in their designs might in turn provide an avenue to support students' collective agency to engage critically with technology.In this paper, we investigate how value-sensitive design (VSD)-based activities and tools can support middle school students in incorporating their values into design projects.We detail the development and implementation of a Design Values card set and values-focused learning activities in an exploratory case study with 24 grade 6/7 students (ages 11-13) over 18 sessions across six weeks.Findings illustrate students' value hierarchies and reasoning, the card set's role in supporting their design processes, and how their values shaped their final designs.We present implications for educational designers and educators along with future directions for research to support designerly well-being.

Understanding the situated challenges that people face when attempting to apply online parenting advice is crucial for building effective digital parenting supports. However, existing HCI methods do not enable researchers to capture the complete breadth of experience relevant to gathering experiential data on both behaviour change processes and lived experiences at scale. This article describes the full development process of adapting existing probe-like methods to capture data about these parenting experiences. We drew on a systematic review of existing probe-like methods and developed a digital probe through user-centred design involving parents. Our study included parent interviews (n = 15), online trials (n = 30, n = 200) and an evaluation of the probe alongside a UK National Health Service parenting intervention (n = 35). Our article contributes insights into how to adapt probes to collect rich parenting data, reveals the kinds of insights gathered and presents new considerations for designing digital parenting interventions that resonate with families.

As researchers and academics, we investigate our bad habitus—our everyday practices around technologies for research that reinforce dynamics of extraction, consumption, and waste—in relation to the lifecycle of technology in academic research. Through qualitative interviews, observation, and visual documentation, this case study explores the consideration of sustainability in purchasing decisions, use, maintenance, and disposal processes of digital devices used in a North American university as well the institution's related policies and procedures and faculty members’ practices. Through this research we find tensions that complicate sustainability in the university research context. We develop a rich description of the complexities of creating sustainable practices, policies, and procedures in a university setting as a step towards becoming more sustainable in our work and in our institutions, and we offer a set of recommendations for our academic institution and systems that both advance and thwart efforts to create sustainable practices.

Since their introduction, there has been wide discussion about how probes are used in human computer interaction (HCI) research. This variation can be problematic for researchers and designers who plan on using probes in the child computer interaction space, as it can be difficult to know which approach is best suited to address their design situation. In this review, we surveyed the ways that HCI researchers have used probes in studies with children and families. Based on 25 articles, we analysed the methodological decisions that researchers have taken in their empirical studies, relating to: a.) the goals for using the probes, b.) the probe itself, c.) participant involvement, and d.) the data and data use. Based on our methodological findings, we highlight four key tensions—including probes as sources of information versus creative input–and consider questions that can guide decision making for developing probes studies with children and families.

AI recommendations influence our daily decisions. The convenience of navigating personalized content goes hand-in-hand with the notorious filter bubble effect, which may decrease people’s exposure to diverse options and opinions. Children are especially vulnerable to this due to their limited AI literacy and critical thinking skills. In this study, we propose a novel Augmented Reality (AR) application BeeTrap. It aims to not only raise children’s awareness of filter bubbles but also empower them to mitigate this ethical issue through sense-making of AI recommendation systems’ inner workings. By having children experience and break filter bubbles in a flower recommendation system, BeeTrap utilizes embodied metaphors (e.g., NEAR-FAR, ITERATION) and analogies (bee pollination) to bridge abstract AI concepts with sensory-motor experiences in familiar STEM contexts. To evaluate our design’s effectiveness and accessibility for a broad range of children, we introduced BeeTrap in a four-day summer camp for middle-school students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM. Results from pre- and post-tests and interviews show that BeeTrap developed students’ technical understanding of AI recommendations, empowered them to break filter bubbles, and helped them foster new personal and societal perspectives around AI technologies.

Virtual reality (VR) offers great promise to expand delivery models for therapeutic interventions to help adolescents develop adaptive emotion regulation skills. Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is an emotion regulation skill that involves changing your thinking to improve your emotional state. However, adolescents face developmental and implementation barriers to do CR successfully. To better understand adolescents’ (15-18 years) lived experience of CR challenges and how they envision VR could support their skills learning and transfer to everyday life, we ran three co-design workshops (N=69). Our research weaves together the workshop findings with prior literature to identify directions for future VR-based CR interventions. From our study results, we generated design strategies leveraging best practices of existing research: embedded and embodied scaffolds, providing different points of view, and externalizing the inner self. To illustrate these strategies in practice, we show how each would work in a challenging emotional scenario identified by adolescents.

Cognitive reappraisal (CR) is a critical emotion regulation skill that is strongly associated with mental well-being outcomes. While CR has been well theorized psychologically and many therapeutic approaches exist, CR remains one of the toughest skills to learn and develop. We explore the design space of using technologically-mediated CR supports through a dual approach. First, we draw on a content analysis of 30 therapeutic manuals combined with five clinician interviews to understand existing CR processes and challenges in therapeutic settings. Second, we compare the identified challenges with a scoping review of 42 HCI papers on technologically-mediated CR interventions. This allowed us to identify trends and gaps in a field where digital health innovations are critically needed; and suggest four design opportunities that warrant further exploration. Together, our work contributes theoretically-derived future research opportunities, and provides researchers with concrete guidance to explore these important design spaces.

Parenting practices have a profound effect on children's well-being and are a core target of several psychological interventions for child mental health. However, there is only limited understanding in HCI so far about how to design socio-technical systems that could support positive shifts in parent-child social practices in situ. This paper focuses on parental socialisation of emotion as an exemplar context in which to explore this question. We present a two-step study, combining theory-driven identification of plausible design directions with co-design workshops with 22 parents of children aged 6-10 years. Our data suggest the potential for technology-enabled systems that aim to facilitate positive changes in parent-child social practices in situ, and highlight a number of plausible design directions to explore in future work.

Cognitive reappraisal is a critical emotion regulation skill required for youth mental health. While it has been well theorized psychologically and many therapeutic approaches exist, youth still struggle to develop these skills. We explore the design space of using virtual reality to create technologically-mediated cognitive reappraisal supports for youth. We developed four VR prototypes that we used as prompts for feedback in a ten-session co-design workshop with nine youth (aged 15-17). Our work contributes youth-derived directions for further research in the design space of VR and mental health; and highlights opportunities to use VR for cognitive reappraisal skills training by generating meaningful emotionally laden situations, supporting body-based experiential learning, and providing technology-mediated social connection.

Design-Based Learning (DBL) is a promising learning approach to nurture 21st century skills. It requires students to leverage social regulation of learning. However, students in elementary education still need to develop these skills. Tangible User Interfaces might help students move up in the developmental trajectory through providing scaffolds and supporting positive interdependence. In this paper, we present the considerations and design of a tool, TangiTeam, that aims to support social regulation during elementary school DBL activities. We hope to inspire teachers and designers to create scaffolds for social regulation.

There is a growing interest in human-computer interaction (HCI) to envision, design, and evaluate technology-enabled interventions that support users’ emotion regulation. This interest stems in part from increased recognition that the ability to regulate emotions is critical to mental health, and that a lack of effective emotion regulation is a transdiagnostic factor for mental illness. However, the potential to combine innovative HCI designs with the theoretical grounding and state-of-the-art interventions from psychology has yet to be fully realised. In this article, we synthesise HCI work on emotion regulation interventions and propose a three-part framework to guide technology designers in making: (i) theory-informed decisions about intervention targets; (ii) strategic decisions regarding the technology-enabled intervention mechanisms to be included in the system; and (iii) practical decisions around previous implementations of the selected intervention components. We show how this framework can both systematise HCI work to date and suggest a research agenda for future work.

There has been an increasing focus on teaching youth about design ethics as part of technical literacy. Biowearables are an emerging technology in which devices worn on children's bodies are used to track, monitor and provide feedback about their biological processes. In this paper we describe an online critical making workshop designed to enable students in middle school years to develop technical literacy skills that include reflection on issues related to design ethics. We investigated if and how our workshop enabled eleven youth, aged 12-14, to reflect through processes of making their own biowearable, on potential negative impacts of biowearables on their developing senses of identity, agency, autonomy and authenticity. The workshop elements included facilitated activities using custom created biowearable-tangible kit and ethics cards. Through qualitative coding and thematic analysis of moments of reflection captured with video, chat, and design journals we gathered evidence of the feasibility of promoting critical making as a means to cultivate technical literacy in youth. Our findings suggest the potential of teaching design ethics through critical making workshops and reveal a range of ways that reflection on ethical issues can be supported during making. We interpret our empirical evidence to further explore how workshop elements supported, or failed to support, learning outcomes and generalize our interpretations to propose preliminary guidance about workshop mechanisms that might be used to support ethical reflection during making.

The IDC community has a rich history of developing new methods for involving children in design research. However, few papers discuss developing new remotely facilitated co-design approaches. Fewer still focus on the challenges of eliciting discussion and generating design ideas around subjective experiences involving emotions, feelings, and thoughts. We argue these are of growing need in a post-Covid world. In this paper we contribute a methodological design rationale for a remotely facilitated co-design study aimed at addressing challenges related to ethically eliciting reflection on, promoting ideation around and capturing data of children and families about their personal Covid-19 experiences. To illustrate our methods, we provide exemplar cases of data collected from our participants to show the type of data that can be elicited using our methods. Lastly, we contribute considerations for future methods design based on a selection of our lessons learned.

There are ethical concerns surrounding how youth interact with biowearable technology and the potential effects it has on their psychological and physiological health. We need to give youth the tools to critically reflect and explore ethical issues surrounding biowearables in order for them to make informed decisions about how they interact with them. To address this, we developed the Biotech Ethics cards as part of a critical making workshop. They are a set of design cards designed to scaffold critical reflection during a critical making workshop where youth prototype a biowearable from a kit. We focus this short paper on the requirements, initial design and revisions we made after studying card use in our workshop. We identified key design elements that are important in the cards and that may generalize to the design of other card sets meant to be integrated into a critical making process.

This workshop aims to bring together IDC authors, academic researchers, and industry practitioners to collaborate in identifying translation practices to reduce IDC's research-practice gap. To achieve this, we will (1) share successes and challenges in translational IDC research, (2) explore current IDC authors’ practices and needs to share their evidence-based research with practitioners, and (3) derive ideas with and feedback from IDC authors with hands-on activities and lightweight processes to translate their IDC research to meet the needs of industry practitioners who work on children's media and technologies. This workshop will bring together IDC community members with practitioners in industry to envision and develop pathways to a sustainable process to share IDC research.

Novice tangible interaction design students often find it challenging to generate input action ideas for tangible interfaces. To identify opportunities to aid input action idea generation, we built and evaluated a tool consisting of interactive physical artifacts coupled with digital examples of tangible systems and technical implementation guidance. Through video recorded design sessions and interviews with twelve students, we investigated how they used the tool to generate input action ideas, how it supported them, and what challenges they faced. We found that the tool helped in generating input action ideas by enabling to experience input actions, supporting hands-on explorations, and introducing possibilities. However, introducing examples at times caused design fixation. The tool fell short in supporting the planning of technical implementation of the generated ideas. This research is useful for tangible interaction design students, instructors, and researchers to apply in education, design similar tools, or conduct further research.

Abstract This mixed methods study examined the impact of two design strategies on interactional processes in a collaborative tangible-tabletop land-use planning simulation. Twenty pairs of fifth grade children used the simulation to create a world they would want to live in. To investigate the impact of positive interdependence half the pairs were assigned one of two roles, each with an associated set of tangible ‘land-use’ stamp tools. All pairs were given access to pause and reflect tools. Quantitative results showed that children in the positive interdependence condition gave more one-way explanations to their partners than control pairs. They also had fewer but longer instances of bilaterally resolved conflict. Qualitative findings indicated the importance of pause and reflect tools for provoking explanations and resolving conflict. This study has revealed important considerations for the instantiation of positive interdependence and reflective pauses in collaborative tabletop learning systems, showing both quantitative and qualitative differences in the interactional processes that result from these design strategies. CCS CONCEPTS. Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

Research at the intersection of technology and sustainability is increasing across disciplines. Virtual reality is one technology used to address social issues, though less work has explored how immersive environments might impact a viewer's impression of complex environmental issues like sustainability.

Integrating physical learning materials with mobile device applications may have benefits for early childhood learning. We present three techniques for creating a hybrid tangible-augmented reality (T-AR) enabling technology platform. This platform enables researchers to develop applications that use readily available physical learning materials, such as letters, numbers, symbols or shapes. The techniques are visual marker-based; computer-vision and machine-learning; and capacitive touches. We describe details of implementation and demonstrate these techniques through a use case of a reading tablet app that uses wooden/plastic letters for input and augmented output. Our comparative analysis revealed that the machine-learning technique most flexibly sensed different physical letter sets but had variable accuracy impacted by lighting and tracking lag at this time. Lastly, we demonstrate how this enabling technology can be generalized to a variety of early learning apps through a second use case with physical numbers.

Augmented reality (AR) apps have the potential to support early English learning for children. However, few studies have investigated how children from rural low socio-economic status (SES) schools, who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) used and perceived an AR app in language learning. In this paper, we present an exploratory case study of 11 EFL children and four school teachers from a Chinese rural county who used an AR app (called AR PhonoBlocks), for one week. The goal of the app is to support children to learn the alphabetic principle of English. The key features are overlaid dynamic colour cues on 3D physical letters. We present the results including themes related to children's interactional behaviours and motivations, and rural teachers' feedback on the opportunities and concerns around using an AR app in a rural school context. We suggest design implications and future research directions for designing AR apps to support EFL children from low SES schools in early English learning.

Science-Fiction (Sci-Fi) movies have long been a frontier in showcasing futuristic computer interfaces and their associated interactions. Unconstrained by technological limitations, they are free to depict the most imaginative systems, including augmenting objects attributes that are not yet possible in reality. We present a case study on Sci-Fi movies where tangible objects are part of these systems, and examine how they illustrate Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) concepts. We provide three examples of tangible systems and one that deviates considerably (holographic system), and analyze them using a well-established interaction model (MCRpd). We found that TUIs in movies exhibit various levels of the model's characteristics and demonstrate an inclusive and diverse context through combining interaction modalities and catering to audience needs. We argue that these aspects provide valuable lessons and implications in designing future TUIs and hope to broaden the design space by initiating discussions on the fascinating worlds in Sci-Fi movies.

EmotoTent is an interactive socio-emotional learning system developed in response to escalating levels of violence, inequality and marginalization in schools seen in the early 21st Century. The system is inspired by advances in biosensing wearables, tattoo displays, brain sensors, robotic agents, artificial intelligence (AI), gestural interaction and 3D holographic displays. By 2030, technological advances will enable us to prototype and investigate questions related to experiential and embodied emotional learning; emotion-based human-computer interaction, affective biosensing, empathetic AI agents, and 3D interactive holographic environments. We envision EmotoTent as a modular, emotion-sensing Holodeck. In the EmotoTent program children learn and practice emotion regulation and empathy with peers, pets and a robotic dog agent in ways that are experiential, embodied and playful. We propose EmotoTent as a core element of a K-6 socio-emotional learning curriculum designed to improve school culture through the enhancement of children's ability to regulate emotions and interact with human and non-human species with empathy and compassion. Enhancing these qualities has been shown to lead to reductions in violence and bullying, racism, gender inequality and other forms of marginalization. We predict that the EmotoTent socio-emotional learning program will improve school cultures and create a foundation for children's lifelong well-being.

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children -- both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar events at previous conferences and aims to foster and strengthen the debate about ethical conduct and moral responsibilities in IDC. In this year's panel, we seek to broaden the discussion by collecting ethical concerns, issues or dilemmas from within the community to be discussed at the conference. To this end, we will issue an open call for input that will be publicised via the usual channels. The organisers then will synthesise the responses and facilitate the discussion and debate at the panel.

About 18% of children in industrialized countries suffer from anxiety. We designed a mobile neurofeedback app, called Mind-Full, based on existing design guidelines. Our goal was for young children in lower socio-economic status schools to improve their ability to self-regulate anxiety by using Mind-Full. In this paper we report on quantitative outcomes from a sixteen-week field evaluation with 20 young children (aged 5 to 8). Our methodological contribution includes using a control group, validated measures of anxiety and stress, and assessing transfer and maintenance. Results from teacher and parent behavioral surveys indicated gains in children's ability to self-regulate anxiety at school and home; a decrease in anxious behaviors at home; and cortisol tests showed variable improvement in physiological stress levels. We contribute to HCI for mental health with evidence that it is viable to use a mobile app in lower socio-economic status schools to improve children's mental health.

Millions of children have challenges with anxiety that negatively impact their development, education and well-being. To address this challenge, we developed version 2.0 of Mind-Full, a wearable, mobile neurofeedback system, designed to teach young children to learn to self-regulate anxiety. We present a mixed methods evaluation of a seven week long intervention in schools. We report on a subset of outcome measures related to 10 children's anxiety and stress in the classroom and describe mediating socio-technological processes that may have impacted outcomes. Findings showed improvement in children's ability to self-regulate anxiety and reduced cortisol levels for some children. Qualitative findings suggested that children who made multimodal connections during system mediated learning and had teacher support for learning transfer responded well to the intervention. We suggest that framing mental health app design as a distributed, adaptive, socio-technological system enables designers to better meet individual's unique and changing mental health needs.

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and persistent or emergent ethical challenges. As a starting point, this panel aims to focus on questions around the involvement of children in our research and we aim to hear from designers and researchers in this community with different backgrounds and perspectives to reflect the diversity of work being done and cultures in which they are conducted.

The wide availability of body-sensing technologies (such as Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect) has the potential to bring full-body interaction to the masses, but the design of hand gestures and body movements that can be easily discovered by the users of such systems is still a challenge. In this paper, we revise and evaluate Framed Guessability, a design methodology for crafting discoverable hand gestures and body movements that focuses participants' suggestions within a "frame," i.e. a scenario. We elicited gestures and body movements via the Guessability and the Framed Guessability methods, consulting 89 participants in-lab. We then conducted an in-situ quasi-experimental study with 138 museum visitors to compare the discoverability of gestures and body movements elicited with these two methods. We found that the Framed Guessability movements were more discoverable than those generated via traditional Guessability, even though in the museum there was no reference to the frame.

Distance separated grandparents and grandchildren often face challenges in staying connected. To explore this topic, we designed G2G, a shared calendar and video messaging system to connect young children (ages 5-10) with their grandparents over distance. Our design focused on providing grandparents and grandchildren with an awareness of each other's lives to support conversations and design elements to help reduce the need for parent scaffolding. A field study with two grandparent-grandchild pairs over two months showed that systems designed around structured communication can help young children develop a routine around staying in touch with their remote grandparents. Autonomy in maintaining awareness can help children to be engaged more easily. This suggests that designs focusing on connecting young children to their grandparents over distance should be flexible yet structured and designing to reduce parental scaffolding can lead to positive effects and strengthened relationships.

Brain--computer interface applications (BCIs) utilizing neurofeedback (NF) can make invisible brain states visible in real time. Learning to recognize, modify, and regulate brain states is critical to all children's development and can improve learning, and emotional and mental health outcomes. How can we design usable and effective NF BCIs that help children learn and practice brain state self-regulation? Our contribution is a list of challenges for this emerging design space and a conceptual framework that addresses those challenges. The framework is composed of five interrelated strong concepts that we adapted from other design spaces. We derived the concepts reflectively, theoretically, and empirically through a design research process in which we created and evaluated a NF BCI, called Mind-Full , designed to help children living in Nepal who had suffered from complex trauma learn to self-regulate anxiety and attention. We add rigor to our derivation methodology by horizontally and vertically grounding our concepts, that is, relating them to similar concepts in the literature and instantiations in other artifacts. We illustrate the generative power of the concepts and the inter-relationships between them through the description of two new NF BCIs we created using the framework for urban and indigenous children with anxiety and attentional challenges. We then show the versatility of our framework by describing how it inspired and informed the conceptual design of three NF BCIs for different types of self-regulation: selective attention and working memory, pain management, and depression. Last, we discuss the contestability, defensibility, and substantiveness of our conceptual framework in order to ensure rigor in our research design process. Our contribution is a rigorously derived design framework that opens up this new and emerging design space of NF BCI's for children for other researchers and designers.

Most ethics boards classify children as a vulnerable population -- all children. The reason given for this is that children lack the necessary cognitive capacity to decide whether or not to participate in most research. It may be difficult for them to foresee the risks and potential benefits to their own well-being or to understand how the conditions of research may or may not be in their own best interests. Children who have special challenges, such as those with dyslexia, ADHD, developmental delays, or mental health issues, or children living in poverty, who may be illiterate or repressed, may have even less capacity to understand and give assent to participate in research. Working with and for children, which is the cornerstone of the child-computer interaction community, raises a number of ethical challenges. First, we must present our research to children in ways they can understand. Because if we don't do this then we exclude the children who could benefit the most from the work we do, because they cannot easily give assent or because they may be difficult to access or work with. This raises an even more important issue. We may think that children can benefit from participating in our research or from using the computational systems that result from our research. But is this true? How do we know if the children we study are benefiting from our research? Third, what happens after our research is over? What legacy do we leave behind when our research is complete?

Children in North America are more likely to suffer from attentional challenges than any other mental health issue. Studies suggest that neurofeedback treatments may be useful for helping these children learn to self-regulate. Applying neurofeedback treatments in real-world, school settings poses a challenge, however, as these environments are often noisy and filled with distractions. The addition of ambient audio to neurofeedback systems may help reduce these disruptions. Further, research suggests that certain auditory treatments, such as binaural beats and white noise, may improve children's focus and aid memory recall. In the following paper we present the theories supporting this idea as well as a mixed methods framework for evaluating whether sound can help children focus while learning to self-regulate using a neurofeedback system. Specifically, we wish to investigate whether these treatments may help children (1) achieve an attentive state sooner and (2) maintain an attentive state for longer, when compared to the same system without sound.

Tangibles may be effective for reading applications. Letters can be represented as 3D physical objects. Words are spatially organized collections of letters. We explore how tangibility impacts reading and spelling acquisition for young Anglophone children who have dyslexia. We describe our theory-based design rationale and present a mixed-methods case study of eight children using our PhonoBlocks system. All children made significant gains in reading and spelling on trained and untrained (new) words, and could apply all spelling rules a month later. We discuss the design features of our system that contributed to effective learning processes, resulting in successful learning outcomes: dynamic colour cues embedded in 3D letters, which can draw attention to how letter(s) position changes their sounds; and the form of 3D tangible letters, which can enforce correct letter orientation and enable epistemic strategies in letter organization that simplify spelling tasks. We conclude with design guidelines for tangible reading systems.

In this paper, we highlight possibilities for designing intangible cultural values into interactions with technologies in heritage spaces. We do this specifically through the design of elwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible table installed in a cultural heritage museum. The tabletop was collaboratively designed to communicate complex and narrative information and values about Musqueam culture. Rather than focusing only on content and interface design, we wanted visitors to also experience Musqueam values through their interactions with the system. We describe our value-sensitive design process, present five interdependent design goals, discuss the design strategies that enabled us to meet these goals, and evaluate our approach through a user study. From our design process and evaluation we offer recommendations for designing values into interactions more generally and for tangible interactions specifically in ways that support visitors' experience and understanding of specific cultural values through technology.

Many couples live apart due to work, educational situations, or frequent travel. While technology can help mediate these relationships, there is a lack of designs that allow couples to share a sense of touch over distance. We present a design case study of a tangible communication system called Flex- N-Feel--a pair of gloves that allows distance-separated couples to feel the flexing of their remote partners' fingers through vibrotactile sensations on their skin. We evaluated our design with nine couples where the system was augmented with either a Skype audio call or a video connection. Our study showed that participants enjoyed their conversation more with the gloves, felt more emotionally connected, and experienced intimate moments together. Couples used the glove for shared actions, playful episodes, intimate touches, and to simply feel each other's presence. Video was important to aid couples in understanding each other's actions. Our results illustrate that designs focusing on physical touch over distance should be open to appropriation such that they can augment existing communication routines and technologies.

Our pictorial visually describes ?elәwkw -- Belongings, an interactive tangible tabletop installed in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. The tabletop was designed to communicate the continuity of Musqueam culture, convey the complexity of belongings that were excavated from Musqueam's ancient village site, and reconnect those belongings to traditional practices and oral histories through tangible interactions with the table-all while highlighting that cultural knowledge should be treated with respect. In this pictorial, we will show how the design process was shared among researchers, curators, and the exhibit Advisory Committee and highlight some of the key design decisions that came out of this collaboration.

The Story of Things (SoT) system enables children to learn the story behind every object they touch in a typical day. Inspired by Living Media and the Internet of Things (IoT) our goal is to change children's awareness through hands-on interaction with the world they live in. A back-of-the-hand display is activated by stick-on finger sensors when a child touches an object. They can tap the display to select from a number of stories stored in a crowd sourced database about that object: the materials it was made from; the processes used to make it; how it impacts their body; how it will be disposed of; environmental or social rights challenges associated with the object; and how they can take positive action. This information is overlaid on the world through an augmented-reality contact lens. SoT will also enable children to see a trace of each day and in doing so help them better understand their environmental footprint and how their actions and choices can change the world for the better or worse.

This hands-on workshop introduces a foundation for designing tangibles for children. Participants engage in a low-fidelity design challenge using the iPad Osmo system. We focus on how designing tangibles for children is unique from other design problems and processes. We walk participants through an outcome driven design process using the award winning Developmentally Situated Design (DSD) card set -- focusing on cognitive, emotional, physical, and social skills specific to children at different ages. Small groups create solutions for the same design challenge, but focus on the skills and abilities of a specific age group. We facilitate a compare and contrast exercise of their solutions to help synthesize the complexities of, and showcase skills for, designing child-centric tangibles. Participants are encouraged to review the DSD II cards in advance, available at www.antle.iat.sfu.ca/DSD, as well the papers [1, 2, 3], to get the most out of their workshop experience. These artifacts and papers will be used to within the workshop for hands-on learning and conceptual discussions.

Dyslexia is a severe impairment in reading and spelling that affects 10% of children in English-speaking countries. One area of difficulty is learning spelling rules that require attention to other letters within a word (i.e., context): for example, why grapple requires two ps while staple requires one. Poor visual attention contributes to children's difficulties. Computer-based programs that use multisensory cues have helped children learn simple letter-sound relations, but not contextual spelling rules. In this paper we present three theoretically derived principles that can be used to design dynamic colour codes for a variety of contextual spelling rules in software systems. We discuss how we used our principles to design the colour scheme for a single contextual spelling rule in our tangible software system, called PhonoBlocks. We evaluate its effectiveness in a field study with nine dyslexic children. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that our approach to using dynamic colour may help children with dyslexia to learn contextual spelling rules, but that individual factors impact the colours' effectiveness. We conclude by suggesting ways our dynamic colour-coding principles can be implemented in other systems taking into consideration individual factors that also impact their effectiveness.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have been suggested to have the potential to support learning for children. Despite the increasing number of TUI reading systems there are few design guidelines for children, especially for those with dyslexia (a specific difficulty in language acquisition skills). In this paper we discuss four design opportunities and five design recommendations for designing tangible reading systems for children, particularly those with dyslexia. We ground our analysis using theories of the causes and interventions for dyslexia, best multisensory training practices and existing research on TUIs that support learning to read for children. We describe our tangible reading system, called PhonoBlocks, focusing on two core design features which take advantage of these opportunities. We also describe how we iteratively fine-tuned the details of our design based on our recommendations, an expert review and feedback from tutors who work with children with dyslexia every day. We include a discussion of design trade-offs in our process. This design rationale paper contributes to the growing research on designing tangible spelling and reading systems for children.

The EmbodySuit augmented human system allows students to experience life from the perspectives of different organisms, by virtually and physically becoming birds, spiders, ants and even bacteria. Inspired by current advances in nanorobotics, Star Trek's holodeck and the Magic school bus, Embodysuit makes learning embodied and experiential. The student becomes a real organism, part of a real, natural ecosystem. The student's senses are adapted to those of the organism, and the student's actions map to the actions of an organism-sized robot inside a real environment. Our system is based on our projection of advances that will occur in the next 35 years in augmented reality, cybernetics and micro robotics. By about 2050 EmbodySuit type systems will be feasible to prototype, enabling us to address key research questions in classroom scientific inquiry; experiential and embodied learning; technology development; and design for 3D embodied cyber-systems.

This hands-on workshop introduces a foundation for designing tangibles for children. Participants engage in a low-fidelity design challenge using the iPad Osmo system. We focus on how designing tangibles for children is unique from other design problems and processes. We walk participants through an outcome driven design process using the award winning Developmentally Situated Design (DSD) card set -- focusing on cognitive, emotional, physical, and social skills specific to children at different ages. Small groups create solutions for the same design challenge, but focus on the skills and abilities of a specific age group. We facilitate a compare and contrast exercise of their solutions to help synthesize the complexities of, and showcase skills for, designing child-centric tangibles. While not necessary for participation, we encourage participants who have them to bring iPads (v2 or higher) or iPad minis. Participants are also encouraged to review the DSD II cards in advance, available at http://www.antle.iat.sfu.ca/DSD.

The ability to view issues through alternate attitudes is an increasingly valuable skill. Persuasive games provide users an opportunity to practice adopting alternate attitudes, but users' pre-existing attitudes can get in the way. Multi-player games can use collaboration to help users overcome their pre-existing attitudes, but techniques for single-player games are lacking. In this paper we suggest that physical interface features (e.g., temperature) could be used to prime alternate attitudes in users. Embodied metaphor theory provides a framework for relating physical characteristics of an interface to more abstract concepts like emotions and beliefs. To empirically validate our design concept, we instantiate it in Thermouse: a temperature-controlled mouse that serves as a research instrument to assess whether interface temperature can help users explore alternate attitudes towards divisive humanitarian issues.

Tangible user interfaces have the potential to support children in learning to read. This research explores the design space of school-based tangible learning systems that support early reading acquisition in children, particularly in children with reading difficulties. Informed by theories of the causes and interventions for dyslexia and research on TUIs for learning, we present the design of a tangible reading system that uses the dynamic colour and tactile cues to help children with dyslexia to learn English letter-sound correspondences. We then propose a case study design that investigates how this system can support children with dyslexia aged 7-8 years old in learning letter-sound correspondences in a school context. We conclude by discussing the future work and potential contributions of this research.

We are interested in novel interactive uses of pressure sensors and vibration actuators that can augment the role of physicality for embodied human perception and experience. Specifically, we explore how wearable technology can be used to provide more realistic present-at-body self-awareness in equestrians. Self-awareness of a rider's own physical cues (output) and how a horse responds (input) requires practice to attain objective adjustment. In this paper we present a proof of concept prototype aimed at providing ways to bridge the gap between rider output perception and reality. Our prototype couples pressure data gathered at specific points of the body in real-time with non-audiovisual tactile vibration feedback that is also site-specific. Our design is intended to enable an effective way for riders to learn about asymmetries in seat-related pressure by providing a present-at-body self-awareness of pressure points.

In this paper we describe a neuro-feedback system and applications we designed and deployed to help vulnerable children at an NGO-funded school, called Nepal House Kaski, in Pokhara, Nepal. The system, called Mind-Full, enables traumatized children to learn and practice self-regulation by playing simple, culturally appropriate games using an EEG headset connected to an interactive tablet. Children can interact with Mind-Full using body actions that may change their physiology and brain states, which are sensed by the EEG headset and used as input to the games. One of the key challenges was to build an application that the children could immediately understand how to use when they are illiterate, don't speak English and have no computer experience. We describe Mind-Full and highlight the design principles we used to meet these constraints. We report on a subset of findings from a 14-week field experiment in which we use a mixed-methods approach to determine if children improved their ability to self-regulate during gameplay as well as in the classroom, playground and in therapy sessions. Findings from quantitative and qualitative assessment measures suggest that the treatment group significantly improved their ability to calm down and focus in a variety of contexts.

Mainstream paper and pencil interventions for Anglophone students with dyslexia emphasize a strategy of analyzing syllables to compensate for irregularities in English letter-sound correspondences. Classroom interventions have developed effective scaffolds for supporting students in analyzing syllables in instructional contexts. However, students typically fail to transfer knowledge to practice contexts (i.e, reading without a tutor). Software has proven to be an effective medium for helping dyslexic students practice basic literacy skills (phoneme awareness and letter knowledge). However, at present, there are no systems specifically designed to support dyslexic students in practicing syllable analysis. Correspondingly, there is a lack of information about which design features would best support dyslexic students in transferring syllable analysis skills from instructional (classroom) to practice (software) contexts. In an attempt to address this gap, we propose two guidelines for software supports of syllable-analysis in dyslexia: 1. Design software that serves as a dual medium for instruction and practice 2. Design scaffolds that serve as dual catalysts for learning and transfer. We realize our guidelines in a prototype software system for syllable analysis that uses colour-coding to direct attention to information during learning and to retrieve learned information during practice.

Dyslexia is defined as severe difficulty learning to read. It affects about 10% of the population in English speaking countries. Severe difficulty learning to read is correlated with tremendous emotional, social and economic costs. In this paper, we describe PhonoBlocks, a tangible user interface to a reading system that uses dynamic colour cues embedded in 3D tangible letters to provide additional decoding information and modalities. PhonoBlocks was developed to support children, aged 5-8 years old, who are having difficulty learning to decode English letter-sound pairs. We present the theoretical foundations as rationale for our core design strategies and decisions. We discuss the assumptions in our design rationale and describe how we will validate our system working with a school for dyslexic children.

Physical experiences are frequently used to represent mathematics to children. However, students sometimes fail to transfer performance to symbolic representations of problems. In this paper, we suggest that tangible interfaces can promote transfer by structuring physical experiences. We realize our concept in a system, Button Matrix, that uses coupled tactile, vibration and visual feedback to a) highlight features of a physical experience that represents arithmetic concepts and b) cue reflection on the links between the physical experience and mathematical symbols.

In task performance, pragmatic actions refer to behaviors that make direct progress, while epistemic actions involve altering the world so that cognitive processes are faster, more reliable or less taxing. Epistemic actions are frequently presented as a beneficial consequence of interacting with tangible systems. However, we currently lack tools to measure epistemic behaviors, making substantiating such claims highly challenging. This paper addresses this problem by presenting ATB, a video-coding framework that enables the identification and measurement of different epistemic actions during problem-solving tasks. The framework was developed through a systematic literature review of 78 papers, and analyzed through a study involving a jigsaw puzzle -- a classical spatial problem -- involving 60 participants. In order to assess the framework's value as a metric, we analyze the study with respect to its reliability, validity and predictive power. The broadly supportive results lead us to conclude that the ATB framework enables the use of observed epistemic behaviors as a performance metric for tangible systems. We believe that the development of metrics focused explicitly on the properties of tangible interaction are currently required to gain insight into the genuine and unique benefits of tangible interaction. The ATB framework is a step towards this goal.

Dyslexic children have great difficulty in learning to read. While research in HCI suggests that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have the potential to support children learning to read, few studies have explored how to help dyslexic children learn to read. Even fewer studies have specifically investigated the design space of texture cues in TUIs in supporting learning to read. In this paper, we present Tactile Letters, a multimodal tangible tabletop with texture cues developed to support English letter-sound correspondence learning for dyslexic children aged 5-6 years old. This prototype is used as a research instrument to investigate the role of texture cues in a multimodal TUI in alphabetic learning. We discuss the current knowledge gap, the theoretical foundations that informed our core design strategy, and the subsequent design decisions we made while developing Tactile Letters.

Designers of natural user interfaces are faced with several challenges when creating interaction models for controlling applications, including the wide range of possible input actions and the lack of affordances, which they can use to design controls. In order to contribute to the development of design guidelines in this design space, we conducted an exploratory, mixed methods study. We investigated three top-down approaches to designing intuitive interaction mappings for a whole body system implemented with camera vision. These were metaphoric, isomorphic and ‘everyday’ or conventional. In order to identify some of the benefits and limitations of each approach, we compared the designs based on measures of usability, intuitiveness and engagement with the material represented in the system. From our study, we found that while the metaphoric design enhanced users’ performance at completing tasks, the lack of discoverability of the interaction model left them feeling incompetent and dissatisfied. We found that the isomorphic design enabled users to focus on tasks rather than learning how to use the system. Conversely, designs based on previous conventions had to be learned, had a time cost for the learning and negatively impacted users’ engagement with content. For tasks and controls that can be designed based on an image schematic input action, users performed most accurately with the metaphoric design. There are benefits and limitations to each approach to designing to support intuitive interaction. We conclude with preliminary design considerations, suggest ways to balance performance with high user satisfaction depending on contextual design goals and question a single definition of intuitive intuition within whole body interface design.

For over thirty years researchers have suggested that both tangible user interfaces and digital games have potential to support learning. Each domain now has a well-developed body of literature about how to design them to enable learning benefits. What is needed is a way to bring this knowledge, which is often lengthy, dense, and jargon laden to design practice. To address this need, we designed Tango Cards--a card-based design tool. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of the cards. We found that Tango Cards enabled a variety of uses that made design knowledge about tangible learning games accessible to designers. We identify and discuss how specific card features support or limit use by designers. We draw on our findings to set forth design considerations that may support others to create design tools (card-based or alike) that make academic design knowledge accessible to designers.

Games for Change (G4C) is a movement and community of practice dedicated to using digital games for social change. However, a common model of persuasion built into most G4C, called Information Deficit, assumes that supporting children to learn facts will result in behavior change around social issues. There is little evidence that this approach works. We propose a model of game play, called Emergent Dialogue, which encourages children to discuss their values during interaction with factual information in a G4C. We summarize a set of guidelines based on our Emergent Dialogue model and apply them to the design of Youtopia, a tangible, tabletop learning game about sustainability. Our goal was to create a game that provided opportunities for children to express and discuss their values around sustainable development tradeoffs during game play. We evaluate our design using video, survey and questionnaire data. Our results provide evidence that our model and design guidelines are effective for supporting valuebased dialogue during collaborative game play.

Many studies suggest that tangibles and digital tabletops have potential to support collaborative interaction. However, previous findings show that users often work in parallel with such systems. One design strategy that may encourage collaboration rather than parallel use involves creating a system that responds to co-dependent access points in which more than one action is required to create a successful system response. To better understand how co-dependent access points support collaboration, we designed a comparative study with 12 young adults using the same application with a co-dependent and an independent access point design. We collected and analyzed categories of both verbal and behavioural data in the two conditions. Our results show support for the co-dependent strategy and suggest ways that the co-dependent design can be used to support flexible collaboration on tangible tabletops for young adults.

Youtopia is a hybrid tangible and multi-touch land use planning activity for elementary school aged children. It was implemented on a Microsoft Pixelsense digital tabletop. The main method of interaction is through physical stamp objects that children use to "stamp" different land use types onto an interactive map. Youtopia was developed to investigate issues surrounding how to design and evaluate children's collaborative learning applications using digital tabletops. In particular we are looking at how the interface design supports in depth discussion and negotiation between pairs of children around issues in sustainable development. Our primary concern is to investigate questions about codependent access points, which may enable positive interdependence among children. Codependent access points are characteristics that enable two or more children to participate and interact together. In Youtopia these implemented through sequences of stamps that are required for successful interaction, which can be assigned to children (codependent mode) or remain unassigned (independent mode).

Research into the effects of serious games often engages with interdisciplinary models of how human behaviors are shaped and changed over time. To better understand these different perspectives we articulate three cognitive models of behavior change and consider the potential of these models to support a deeper understanding of behavior change in serious games. Two of these models -- Information Deficit and Procedural Rhetoric -- have already been employed in the design of serious games, while the third -- Emergent Dialogue -- is introduced from the field of Environmental Studies. We situate this discussion within a context of designing games for public engagement with issues of environmental sustainability.

We present the results from a mixed methods comparison of a tangible and a multi-touch interface for a spatial problem solving task. We applied a modified version of a previous framework to code video of hand-based events. This enabled us to investigate motor-cognitive strategies as well as traditional performance and preference constructs. Sixteen adult participants completed jigsaw puzzles using both interfaces. Our results suggest that the 3D manipulation space, eyes-free tactile feedback, and the offline workspace afforded by the tangible interface enabled more efficient and effective motor-cognitive strategies. We discuss the implications of these findings for interface design; including suggestions for spatial and visual structures that may support epistemic strategies, and hybrid interfaces where tangible handles may be used as structural anchors as well as controls and representational objects.

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical and tangible interfaces may facilitate the development of thinking skills including mental visualisation, problem space exploration and collaboration. We utilise the theory of complementary actions taken from embodied cognition to develop a video coding methodology that allows us to classify behavioural activity and make inferences about thinking skills development. Our findings indicated that the combination of direct hands-on input style with audio-visual feedback facilitated by the tangible user interface enabled a dynamic task completion strategy, which supports the development of mental skills with a slight time cost. The mouse and graphical user interface supported a trial and error approach, which may limit skills development. The physical cardboard puzzle enabled effective task completion but provided less support for social interaction and problem space exploration. We conclude with design recommendations.

Many researchers have suggested that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have potential for supporting learning. However, the theories used to explain possible effects are often invoked at a very broad level without explication of specific mechanisms by which the affordances of TUIs may be important for learning processes. Equally problematic, we lack theoretically grounded guidance for TUI designers as to what design choices might have significant impacts on learning and how to make informed choices in this regard. In this paper, we build on previous efforts to address the need for a structure to think about TUI design for learning by constructing the Tangible Learning Design Framework. We first compile a taxonomy of five elements for thinking about the relationships between TUI features, interactions and learning. We then briefly review cognitive, constructivist, embodied, distributed and social perspectives on cognition and learning and match specific theories to the key elements in the taxonomy to determine guidelines for design. In each case, we provide examples from previous work to explicate our guidelines; where empirical work is lacking, we suggest avenues for further research. Together, the taxonomy and guidelines constitute the Tangible Learning Design Framework. The framework advances thinking in the area by highlighting decisions in TUI design important for learning, providing initial guidance for thinking about these decisions through the lenses of theories of cognition and learning, and generating a blueprint for research on testable mechanisms of action by which TUI design can affect learning.

Theories of embodiment focus on how practical engagement and the structure of the body shape perception, experience, and cognition. They typically reject a view of human cognition as grounded in abstract information processing. The concept of embodied interaction is increasingly used in the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactions with and around technology. However, many questions remain as to exactly what embodied interaction means and whether it can be considered a coherent program of research. The opportunities to support embodied interaction have expanded significantly in recent years with the development of a range of technologies designed to sense movements of the body and the continued development of ubiquitous computing infrastructures that can gather or represent contextual data. There has also been a surge of interest in embodiment in HCI.

Multimodal interfaces including tablets, touch tables, and tangibles are beginning to receive much attention in the child-computer interaction community. Such interfaces enable interaction through actions, gestures, touch, and other modalities not tapped into by traditional desktop computing. Researchers have suggested that multimodal interfaces, such as tangibles, have great potential to support children's learning and problem solving in spatial domains due to the hands-on physical and spatial properties of this interaction style. Despite a long history of hands-on learning with physical and computational materials, there is little theoretical or empirical work that identifies specific causes for many of the claimed benefits. Neither is there empirically validated design guidance as to what design choices might be expected to have significant impacts. In this paper I suggest several avenues of investigation, based on my own research interests, which would address this knowledge gap. I provide summaries of theoretical mechanisms that may explain claimed benefits, outline how the specific features of tangible interfaces might support or enhance these mechanisms, and describe current and future investigations that address current gaps of knowledge.

Recently, there has been widespread growth of shopping and buying on mobile devices, termed mCommerce. With this comes a need to understand how to best design experiences for mobile shopping. To help address this, we conducted a diary and interview study with mCommerce shoppers who have already adopted the technology and shop on their mobile devices regularly. Our study explores typical mCommerce routines and behaviours along with issues of soft trust, given its long-term concern for eCommerce. Our results describe spontaneous purchasing and routine shopping behaviours where people gravitate to their mobile device even if a computer is nearby. We found that participants faced few trust issues because they had limited access to unknown companies. In addition, app marketplaces and recommendations from friends offered a form of brand protection. These findings suggest that companies can decrease trust issues by tying mCommerce designs to friend networks and known marketplaces. The caveat for shoppers, however, is that they can be easily lured into a potentially false sense of trust.

If tangible user interfaces (TUIs) are going to move out of research labs and into mainstream use they need to support tasks in abstract as well as spatial domains. Designers need guidelines for TUIs in these domains. Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be used to design the relations between physical objects and abstract representations. In this paper, we use physical attributes and spatial properties of objects as source domains for conceptual metaphors. We present an empirical study where twenty participants matched physical representations of image schemas to metaphorically paired adjectives. Based on our findings, we suggest twenty pairings that are easily identified, suggest groups of image schemas that can serve as source domains for a variety of metaphors, and provide guidelines for structuring physical-abstract mappings in abstract domains. These guidelines can help designers apply metaphor theory to design problems in abstract domains, resulting in effective interaction.

For centuries, learning and development has been supported by physical activity and manipulating physical objects. With the introduction of embedded technologies, opportunities for employing tangible or embodied interaction for learning and development have emerged. As a result of previous research, we have seen that interaction models based on embodied knowledge (through embodied metaphors) can support children’s learning in abstract domains. Although metaphorical mappings are promoted in tangible and embodied interaction research, little is known about how to identify embodied metaphors, or how to implement them effectively into interaction models. In this paper, we introduce a people-centered, iterative approach to the design of tangible learning systems with embodied metaphor-based mappings. As a design case, we implemented our approach to the design of Moving Sounds (MoSo) Tangibles; a tangible system for learning abstract sound concepts. The system consists of a set of interactive tangibles with which children can manipulate pitch, volume, and tempo of ongoing tones. In a user study with 39 participants, we found that all children were able to reproduce sound samples with MoSo Tangibles.

We describe a tangible user interface-based learning environment for children called Towards Utopia. The environment was designed to enable children, aged seven to ten, to actively construct knowledge around concepts related to land use planning and sustainable development in their community. We use Towards Utopia as a research prototype to investigate how and why tangible users interfaces can be designed to support, augment, or constrain learning opportunities. We follow a design-oriented research approach that includes a theoretically grounded analysis of design features of Towards Utopia to understand how and why design choices influence the kinds of learning opportunities created. We also describe the results of our empirical evaluation of learning outcomes in order to validate the effectiveness of our design. We conclude with general guidelines for the design of tangibles for learning.

There is a wealth of theoretical knowledge about the developmental abilities and skills of children. However, this knowledge is not readily accessible to designers of interactive products. In this paper, we present the requirements, design and evaluation of developmentally situated design (DSD) cards. DSD cards are a design tool that makes age specific information about children's developing cognitive, physical, social, and emotional abilities readily accessible for designers. Initial requirements were elicited through interviews with design practitioners and students. The cards were evaluated through a design-in-use study in which design students used the cards to address three different design problems. Our analysis of observational notes and post-design interviews revealed how the cards' characteristics enabled different kinds of uses including framing, orienting, inspiring, informing, integrating and constraining. We conclude with a discussion of possible refinements and an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.

This paper introduces a collaborative learning game called Futura: The Sustainable Futures Game, which is implemented on a custom multi-touch digital tabletop platform. The goal of the game is to work with other players to support a growing population as time passes while minimizing negative impact on the environment. The design-oriented research goal of the project is to explore the novel design space of collaborative, multi-touch tabletop games for learning. Our focus is on identifying and understanding key design factors of importance in creating opportunities for learning. We use four theoretical perspectives as lenses through which we conceptualize our design intentions and inform our analysis. These perspectives are: experiential learning, constructivist learning, collaborative learning, and game theory. In this paper we discuss design features that enable collaborative learning, present the results from two observational studies, and compare our findings to other guidelines in order to contribute to the growing body of empirically derived design guidelines for tangible, embodied and embedded interaction.

Using tangible interaction in interactive educational systems can benefit learning. This can be supported by relying on experientially originating schemata in the interaction design of learning systems. This paper presents the design and evaluation of MoSo Tangibles, a set of interactive, physical artifacts with which children manipulate the pitch, volume and tempo of ongoing tones, in order to structure their understanding of these abstract sound concepts in terms of multiple different concrete body-based concepts. The results indicate that MoSo provided children with a physical handle to reason about the targeted abstract concepts.

In this paper we describe the Reading Glove, a wearable RFID reader for interacting with a tangible narrative. Based on interviews with study participants, we present a set of observed themes for understanding how the wearable and tangible aspects of the Reading Glove influence the user experience. We connect our observational themes to theoretical notions from interactive narrative and tangible interaction to create a set of design considerations such as enacting a role, ownership and permission, multiplicity of interpretations and boundary objects.

StitchRV is a fiducial and touch-tracking engine based on the popular reacTIVision fiducial tracking system. StitchRV combines video input from multiple cameras in real time, and can be customized for a wide range of hardware and fiducial tracking applications through the high-performace rapid prototyping environment openFrameworks. The multi-camera approach facilitated by StitchRV also allows greater diversity and flexibility than single-camera systems when designing computer vision based tangible and multitouch prototypes.

We investigate the similarities and differences -- in terms of quantitative performance and qualitative behaviors -- between how children solve an object manipulation task using mouse-based input versus tangible-based input. This work examines the assumption common in tangible computing that direct physical manipulation is beneficial for certain spatial tasks. We describe an ecologically valid comparison of mouse-based versus tangible-based input for a jigsaw puzzle task in order to better understand the tradeoffs in choosing input and interaction styles. We include a traditional cardboard puzzle for comparative purposes. The results of an experiment with 132 children indicate children are more successful and faster at solving puzzles using a tangible-based approach. Detailed temporal analysis indicates that pairs in the tangible group spend most of their time using a combination of epistemic and pragmatic actions which support mental problem solving. Conversely, pairs in the mouse group use an ineffective trial and error strategy.

As computation plays an ever larger role as an embedded part of the environment, research that seeks to understand the embodied nature of children's interactions with computation becomes increasingly important. Embodied interaction is an approach to understanding human-computer interaction that seeks to investigate and support the complex interplay of mind, body and environment in interaction. Recently, such a perspective has been used to discuss human actions and interactions with a range of computational applications including tangibles, mobiles, robotics and gesture-based interfaces. Physically-based forms of child computer interaction including body movements, the ability to touch, feel, manipulate and build sensory awareness of the relationships in the world are crucial to children's cognitive and social development. This workshop aims to critically explore the different approaches to incorporating an embodied perspective in children's interaction design and HCI research, and to develop a shared set of understandings and identification of differences, similarities and synergies between our research approaches.

Physical activity and manipulating physical objects can be beneficial for learning. Earlier studies 2 have shown that interaction models that rely on unconscious and embodied knowledge (based on embodied metaphors) can benefit the learning process. However, more than one embodied metaphor might be applicable. In this paper, we present the results of a user study (n=65) designed to identify embodied metaphors seven to nine year old children use when enacting abstract concepts related to musical sound. The results provide evidence that multiple different embodied metaphors can unconsciously be used to structure the understanding of these concepts. In addition, we have identified and categorized commonly used metaphors based on the children's enactments of changing sound concepts.

Supporting users' reasoned imagination in sense making during interaction with tangible and embedded computation involves supporting the application of their existing mental schemata in understanding new forms of interaction. Recent studies that include an embodied metaphor in the interaction model, which relates action-based inputs to digital outputs, have provided evidence that this approach is beneficial. Yet the design of such systems has been difficult and full of setbacks. Wide spread adoption of this approach requires a better understanding of how to design such embodied metaphor-based interactional models. We analyze three recent design-based research studies in which we have been involved in order to derive design knowledge that may inform others. Following a case study methodology we identify kernels or points in the design process where discontinuities between predicted and actual interaction highlight important design knowledge.

The EventTable technique is a tangible object tracking technique implemented on a camera vision based tabletop platform. The technique supports an event-driven -- rather than object centric -- tracking technique. Fiducial markers are distributed between objects. When objects are brought into a proximal or connected relationship, a whole marker is formed and recognized by the tracking system. Thus, rather than tracking each individual object, the system tracks user-driven events that occur when two or more objects are proximal. The technique can be used in addition to individual object tracking and touch tracking. This approach provides a reliable and flexible approach to tabletop object tracking for a wide variety of tabletop activities. We describe three prototype applications to illustrate how the distributed marker technique can be applied. We describe the advantages and limitations of this approach. We conclude with a brief discussion of how the EventTable technique enables a shift in human computer interaction research from an information-centric to an action-centric epistemological view on how users' create meaning.

A recent trend in ubiquitous computing is the development of new forms of interfaces, which rely on embodied interaction. We focus on the definition of embodiment that refers to the ways in which abstract concepts rely on metaphorical extensions of embodied schemata shaped by processes below the level of conscious awareness as explored by Lakoff and Johnson [Lakoff, G., Johnson, M., 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA]. Our inquiry focuses on understanding the role embodied metaphors may play in supporting people to understand the possibilities for physical interaction in augmented spaces. We explore this issue through the development and evaluation of an interactive audio environment. We instantiate metaphor theory by using embodied schemata as the basis for the interactional metaphor that relates full-body input actions to audio output responses. We demonstrate and explore the benefits of this approach through a comparative experiment in which adults and children learn to use our audio environment. The results from our experiment indicated that embodied metaphors improve usability however, other factors including discoverability, perceivability of feedback and duplicity of structural isomorphism may mediate these metaphor-based benefits. We have generalized our main findings as a set of suggestions for the design of embodied style interfaces that rely on physical interaction.

In this paper we present the results of a comparative study that explores the potential benefits of using embodied interaction to help children, aged 7 to 10, learn abstract concepts related to musical sounds. Forty children learned to create musical sound sequences using an interactive sound making environment. Half the children used a version of the system that instantiated a body-based metaphor in the mapping layer connecting body movements to output sounds. The remaining children used a version of the same environment that did not instantiate a metaphor in the mapping layer. In general, children were able to more accurately demonstrate sound sequences in the embodied metaphor based system version. However, we observed that children often resorted to spatial rather than body-based metaphors and that the mapping must be easily discoverable as well as metaphorical to provide benefit.

As TUI research moves from technical to empirical studies which explore theoretical claims, it is important for researchers to be able to quickly and easily build low fidelity (lo-fi) prototypes to explore the unique features of interaction that TUIs offer. Currently, the best practices for choosing prototyping materials are vague at best. In this paper, I present an analysis of the role of materials in inquiry and propose a set of criteria for evaluating the suitability of lo-fi prototyping materials.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory comparative study in which we investigated the relationship between interface style and school-aged children's enjoyment and engagement while doing puzzles. Pairs of participants played with a jigsaw puzzle that was implemented using three different interface styles: physical (traditional), graphical and tangible. In order to investigate interactional differences between the three interface styles, we recorded subjective ratings of enjoyment, three related subscales, measured times and counts of behavioral based indications of engagement. Qualitative analysis based on observational notes and audio responses to open interview questions helped contextualize the quantitative findings and provided key insights into interactional differences not apparent in the quantitative findings. We summarize our main findings and discuss the design implications for tangible user interfaces.

New forms of tangible and spatial child computer interaction and supporting technologies can be designed to leverage the way children develop intelligence in the world. The author describes a preliminary design framework which conceptualizes how the unique features of tangible and spatial interactive systems can be utilized to support the cognitive development of children under the age of twelve. The framework is applied to the analytical evaluation of an existing tangible interface.

This paper describes the theoretical framework, design, implementation and results from an exploratory informant workshop that examines an alternative approach to sound feedback in the design of responsive environments for children. This workshop offers preliminary directions and models for using intensity-based ambient sound display in the design of interactive learning environments for children that offer assistance in task-oriented activities. We see the value of this research in developing a more cohesive and ecological model for use of audio feedback in the design of embedded interactions for children. The approach presented here takes the design of multi-modal feedback beyond being experiential, to one that supports learning and problem solving.

This paper introduces a practice-based, child-centric method of creating child-user archetypes which extends adult-based persona theory to interaction design with children. Persona construction can help interaction designers better understand real child-users and result in rich child-user archetypes which are developmentally situated and contextually valid. Key differences between adult-personas and child-personas are highlighted. A description of an online mentoring application created for CBC4Kids.ca illustrates the value of child-personas in design practice.

Children are routinely exposed to adult-oriented news and current events. Outside of their families, they rarely have forums in which they can explore and express their reactions to and feelings about these events. This paper introduces OutBurst (http://archived.cbc4kids.cbcr3.com/), a networked, participatory activity where children can express and explore their intimate feelings about news and current events. Outlined in this paper are the child-centric requirements, design and evaluation practices used to create OutBurst; a discussion of questions that were raised in the design process; findings culled from a summative evaluation of the entire CBC4Kids pilot; and a description of the subsequent content analysis of child-generated submissions. Our investigations show evidence of children expressing and exploring their emotional reactions to adult-oriented news stories. However, many of our original questions about the utility of an online environment to support these aims remain outstanding and require further exploration.

This paper describes the design of an online collaborative storytelling environment for children aged 8--10. The project balances children's needs to have flexible creative environments [22] with the desire of a public broadcaster to publish quality user-generated content that showcases Canadian stories. This paper outlines five key practices that contributed to the successful design of StoryBuilder. Ninety-five children were involved in the project using a combination of informant-based and user-centred iterative design techniques. Examination and observation of oral storytelling activities and behaviors, technology-based creativity tools and storytelling styles formed the basis for the remaining design practices.