Soul Support is a wearable emotional support system designed with and for children during two intergenerational co-design focused on addressing the 2025 IDC) Research and Design Challenge.The intergenerational design team, Kidsteam at Boise -comprising children ages 6-11 and adults -generated and selected features through sketching, group voting, and hands-on prototyping activities.The final concept includes two physical devices: a wristband with sensors (Soul Band) and a necklace with a neural interface (Soul Necklace).When activated, these devices actuate a digital assistant that responds through speech, holograms, or other interactive outputs.The assistant can share affirmations, calming videos, music, advice, or jokes depending on the user's emotional state.The low-tech prototyping sessions focused on providing support in ways that felt helpful but not intrusive, prioritizing empathy, choice, and personalization.This paper describes the co-design process and outcomes, and how the final concept addresses emotional needs while aligning with the challenge theme of hope.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss research on extended reality (XR) technologies for children, including identifying risks, opportunities, and ethical guidelines.The workshop builds on prior child-computer interaction research on XR technologies, as well as prior SIGs and workshops focused on ethics.Our goal is to discuss state-of-the art research on XR technologies and outline ethical concerns and future research challenges.

In this work, we discuss the findings emerging from co-design sessions between children ages 6 to 11 and adults, which were conducted to advance knowledge on how to best support children using well-known search tools for online information discovery. Specifically, we argue that by leveraging scaffolding, gamification techniques, and design choices via an application, it is possible to enhance children’s habits related to query formulation. Outcomes from this preliminary exploration reveal that gameplay incentives (e.g. levels, points, and other incentives like customization) are needed and effective in motivating further interaction with the application, which in turn leads to further utilization of the scaffolding needed to positively impact query formulation.

Children often interact with search engines within a classroom context to complete assignments or discover new information. To successfully identify relevant resources among those presented on a search engine results page (SERP), users must first be able to comprehend the text included in SERP snippets. While this task may be straightforward for an adult user, children may encounter obstacles in terms of readability and comprehension when attempting to navigate a SERP. Previous research has demonstrated the positive impact of including visual cues on a SERP as relevance signals to guide children toward appropriate resources. In this work, we explore the effect of supplying visual cues related to readability and text difficulty on children’s (ages 6-12) navigation of a SERP. Using quantitative data collected from user-interface interactions and qualitative data gathered from participant interviews, we analyze the impact of these visual cues on children’s selection of results on a SERP when carrying out information discovery tasks.

One of the largest barriers to communication is a difference in language. There are thousands of spoken languages, and no one human is capable of learning all of them – especially for those travelling or immigrating to a new country. For this problem we propose the Audiovisual Virtual Assistant (AVA): a helmet with integrated augmented reality (AR) designed to translate foreign languages both auditory and visually. AVA is also capable of taking cultural context and currency exchange into account with translating.

Current approaches in automatic readability assessment have found success with the use of large language models and transformer architectures. These techniques lead to accuracy improvement, but they do not offer the interpretability that is uniquely required by the audience most often employing readability assessment tools: teachers and educators. Recent work that employs more traditional machine learning methods has highlighted the linguistic importance of considering semantic and syntactic characteristics of text in readability assessment by utilizing handcrafted feature sets. Research in Education suggests that, in addition to semantics and syntax, phonetic and orthographic instruction are necessary for children to progress through the stages of reading and spelling development; children must first learn to decode the letters and symbols on a page to recognize words and phonemes and their connection to speech sounds. Here, we incorporate this word-level phonemic decoding process into readability assessment by crafting a phonetically-based feature set for grade-level classification for English. Our resulting feature set shows comparable performance to much larger, semantically- and syntactically-based feature sets, supporting the linguistic value of orthographic and phonetic considerations in readability assessment.

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

Many children born between 2010 and 2016 have access to an unprecedented variety of digital environments which comprise an evolutionarily novel landscape. Parental caregivers must make decisions without traditional environmental knowledge, introducing a high degree of uncertainty into parenting strategies. Evolutionary approaches reveal an adaptive mismatch between internet-enabled digital technologies and human behavioral adaptations. This mismatch represents a peculiarly human variant on the struggles of organisms to adapt to changing environments, and is characterized by the utilization of information-deficient strategies. This study applies models developed in evolutionary ecology to research on parental strategies for managing children’s online activities. Using semi-structured interviews of parents (n=20) of children in middle childhood (ages 6-12) and a dialogic method of synthesis, we found that parents lack effective strategies for navigating online environments and cannot conceptualize the technologies and corporate powers shaping the online worlds their children encounter. We conceptualize these digital environments as an evolutionarily novel landscape producing adaptive lag and propose a continuous two-dimensional framework which describes observed patterns of intersection between parental investment and parenting strategies. Less intelligible threats are rationalized, while tactics aimed at more proximally actionable threats are prioritized. Building on adaptive vigilance and parental investment, our work shows the value of evolutionary models in understanding parental responses to digital environments.

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations.

In this paper, we explore how children engage with search engine result pages (SERP) generated by a popular search API in response to their online inquiries. We do so to further understand children navigation behaviour. To accomplish this goal, we examine search logs produced as a result of children (ages 6 to 12), using metrics commonly used to operationalize engagement, including: position of clicks, time spent hovering, and the sequence of navigation on a SERP. We also investigate the potential connection between the text complexity of SERP snippets and engagement. Our findings verify that children engage more frequently with SERP results in higher ranking positions, but that engagement does not decrease linearly as children navigate to lower ranking positions. They also reveal that children generally spend more time hovering on snippets with more complex readability levels (i.e., harder to read) than snippets on the lower end of the readability spectrum.

In this workshop, we invite researchers, practitioners and designers to reflect on ethical issues arising from Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research with children. As participatory design research practices require rethinking and innovative adaptation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed, asynchronous and online (D)PD approaches may provide solutions to participation barriers. However, in light of this adaptation, additional ethical complexities may arise. Ongoing collaborative discussion is required to identify and address the different types of ethical issues which may arise when planning and conducting DPD projects with children. This workshop builds on previous workshops held at IDC 2021 and 2020, which provided insights into developing a protocol for a world-wide DPD project with children.

In this paper, we outline a Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research protocol. The protocol is presented through the lens of the World’s Largest DPD Project with children, a hypothetical project in which children address the issue of climate change. The DPD research protocol is based on the protocol template recommended by WHO’s Research Ethics Review Committee (ERC) and on the data from two conference workshops with a total of 45 participants. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) an initial version of a generic DPD research protocol; 2) an exemplification of how to appropriate this protocol for a specific project. We expect this protocol will be iteratively refined and will serve as inspiration for future research practices in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI).

Having a healthy social life is an important part of our mental health, especially when it comes to children. Kids need to feel a connection between the environments in which they both live and play. In the last two years, COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our lives both personally and professionally. Because of the pandemic, meeting people in physical locations has been problematic. This situation has only amplified the need to foster connections. Technology plays a crucial role in helping children stay connected, however, we have found that children are more accepting of this when they are allowed to be able to take more active role in developing these platforms. Creating virtual environments, for example, has been shown to increase the interest of children in reaching out to their friends and family, and connecting with others across time zones, languages, and cultures. The children’s Idea Booklet, from the 2022 ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Research & Design Challenge identified significant interest in children using VR headset technology to connect with friends and family. Our research team, KidsTeam, built on these ideas to design KidConnect VR. KidConnect VR allows kids to connect with others via a virtual environment. This environment can be built to look like their surrounding area. In the virtual world, children can play, chat, and even study with friends.

The role that technology plays in supporting children at school and at home is more prominent than ever before due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This has prompted us to focus the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) workshop on what the lasting changes will be to the design and development of child information retrieval systems. After two years, are information retrieval systems used more in and out of the classroom? Are they more interactive, more or less personalized? What is the impact on the research and business community? Are there long-term and unexpected changes on the design, ethics, and algorithms? The primary goal of our workshop continues to be to build community by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders from various backgrounds and disciplines to understand and advance information retrieval systems for children.

In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children’s engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session to enable us to elicit children’s preferences and determine what children (ages 6–12) find lacking in more traditional SERP. We learned that children want more dynamic means of navigating results and additional ways to interact with results via icons. We use these findings to inform the design of a new SERP interface, which we denoted CHIRP. To gauge the type of engagement that a SERP incorporating interactive elements–CHIRP–can foster among children, we conducted a user study at a public school. Analysis of children’s interactions with CHIRP, in addition to responses to a post-task survey, reveals that adding additional interaction points results in a SERP interface that children prefer, but one that does not necessarily change engagement levels through clicks or time spent on SERP.

In this workshop, we invite researchers and practitioners as participants in co-designing the protocol for the world’s largest Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) project with children. Participatory Design – whose inclusive benefits are broadly recognised in design – can be very challenging, especially when involving children. The current COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to further barriers to PD with such groups. Recent key barriers include social distancing and government-imposed social restrictions due to the additional health risks to vulnerable children and their families. This disrupts traditional in-person PD (which involves close socio-emotional and often physical collaboration between participants and researchers). However, alongside such barriers, we have identified opportunities for new and augmented approaches to PD across distributed geographies, backgrounds, ages and abilities. We invite the CCI community to examine Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) as a solution for overcoming these new barriers, during and after COVID-19. Together, we offer new ways to think about DPD, and unpick some of its ambiguities. This workshop builds on work conducted in a similar workshop in IDC 2020, and this year will focus on the planning and design of the protocol for the world’s largest DPD project with children.

In this past year, the role of technology to support education has been more prominent than ever. This has prompted us to focus the 5th Edition of the International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) around a major stakeholder when it comes to technology adoption for the classroom: the teacher. Much like in the previous editions of the workshop, our priority remains understanding what is good when it comes to information retrieval systems for children, this time from the perspectives of teachers. In order to control scope of our discussion and continue to advance knowledge in this area, we focus on technology that enables information discovery in the classroom context: search and recommendation systems. Expected outcomes from this workshop remain building community in this important area of work and extend the framework we have been defining to enable design and evaluation of good information retrieval systems for children.

As news is increasingly spread through social media platforms, the problem of identifying misleading or false information (colloquially called "fake news'') has come into sharp focus. There are many factors which may help users judge the accuracy of news articles, ranging from the text itself to meta-data like the headline, an image, or the bias of the originating source. In this research, participants (\textitn = 175) of various political ideological leaning categorized news articles as real or fake based on either article text or meta-data. We used a mixed methods approach to investigate how various article elements (news title, image, source bias, and excerpt) impact users' accuracy in identifying real and fake news. We also compared human performance to automated detection based on the same article elements and found that automated techniques were more accurate than our human sample while in both cases the best performance came not from the article text itself but when focusing on some elements of meta-data. Adding the source bias does not help humans, but does help computer automated detectors. Open-ended responses suggested that the image in particular may be a salient element for humans detecting fake news.

Spellchecking functionality embedded in existing search tools can assist children by offering a list of spelling alternatives when a spelling error is detected. Unfortunately, children tend to generally select the first alternative when presented with a list of options, as opposed to the one that matches their intent. In this paper, we describe a study we conducted with 191 children ages 6-12 in order to offer empirical evidence of: (1) their selection habits when identifying spelling suggestions that match the word they meant to type, and (2) the degree of influence multimodal cues, i.e., synthesized speech and images, have in prompting children to select the correct spelling suggestion. The results from our study reveal that multimodal cues, primarily synthesized speech, have a positive impact on the children's ability to identify their intended word from a list of spelling suggestions.

For help with their spelling errors, children often turn to spellcheckers integrated in software applications like word processors and search engines. However, existing spellcheckers are usually tuned to the needs of traditional users (i.e., adults) and generally prove unsatisfactory for children. Motivated by this issue, we introduce KidSpell, an English spellchecker oriented to the spelling needs of children. KidSpell applies (i) an encoding strategy for mapping both misspelled words and spelling suggestions to their phonetic keys and (ii) a selection process that prioritizes candidate spelling suggestions that closely align with the misspelled word based on their respective keys. To assess the effectiveness of, we compare the model’s performance against several popular, mainstream spellcheckers in a number of offline experiments using existing and novel datasets. The results of these experiments show that KidSpell outperforms existing spellcheckers, as it accurately prioritizes relevant spelling corrections when handling misspellings generated by children in both essay writing and online search tasks. As a byproduct of our study, we create two new datasets comprised of spelling errors generated by children from hand-written essays and web search inquiries, which we make available to the research community.

Internet usage continues to increase among children ages 12 and younger. Because their digital interactions can be persistently stored, there is a need for building an understanding and foundational knowledge of privacy. We describe initial investigations into children's understanding of privacy from a Contextual Integrity (CI) perspective by conducting semi-structured interviews. We share results -- that echo what others have shown -- that indicate children have limited knowledge and understanding of CI principles. We also share an initial exploration of utilizing participatory design theater as a possible educational mechanism to help children develop a stronger understanding of important privacy principles.

Despite its inherent challenges, participatory design (PD) has unique benefits when designing technology for children, especially children with special needs. Researchers have developed a multitude of PD approaches to accommodate specific populations. However, a lack of understanding of the appropriateness of existing approaches across contexts presents a challenge for PD researchers. This workshop will provide an opportunity for PD researchers to exchange and reflect on their experiences of designing with children with special needs. We aim to identify, synthesize and collate PD best practices across contexts and participant groups.

Misspellings in queries used to initiate online searches is an everyday occurrence. When this happens, users either rely on the search engine's ability to understand their query or they turn to spellcheckers. Spellcheckers are usually based on popular dictionaries or past query logs, leading to spelling suggestions that often better resonate with adult users because that data is more readily available. Based on an educational perspective, previous research reports, and initial analyses of sample search logs, we hypothesize that existing spellcheckers are not suitable for young users who frequently encounter spelling challenges when searching for information online. We present early results of our ongoing research focused on identifying the needs and expectations children have regarding spellcheckers.

Children use popular web search tools, which are generally designed for adult users. Because children have different developmental needs than adults, these tools may not always adequately support their search for information. Moreover, even though search tools offer support to help in query formulation, these too are aimed at adults and may hinder children rather than help them. This calls for the examination of existing technologies in this area, to better understand what remains to be done when it comes to facilitating query-formulation tasks for young users. In this paper, we investigate interaction elements of query formulation--including query suggestion algorithms--for children. The primary goals of our research efforts are to: (i) examine existing plug-ins and interfaces that explicitly aid children's query formulation; (ii) investigate children's interactions with suggestions offered by a general-purpose query suggestion strategy vs. a counterpart designed with children in mind; and (iii) identify, via participatory design sessions, their preferences when it comes to tools / strategies that can help children find information and guide them through the query formulation process. Our analysis shows that existing tools do not meet children's needs and expectations; the outcomes of our work can guide researchers and developers as they implement query formulation strategies for children.

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.

Today's children spend considerable time online, searching and receiving information from various websites and apps. While searching for information, e.g. for school or hobbies, children use search systems to locate resources and receive site recommendations that might be useful for them. The call for good, reliable, child-friendly systems has been made many times and the thesis that the algorithms of "adult" information systems are not necessarily suitable or fair for children is widely accepted. However, there is still no clear and balanced view on what makes one search/recommendation system for children good or better than other systems, nor on what content should be considered "good enough to be retrieved" or recommended. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in education, child-development, computer science, and more who can address this questions while considering issues related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, evaluation.

Children continue to use technology at an increasing rate, more and more of which require authentication via usernames and passwords. We seek to understand how children ages 5-11 years old create and use their credentials. We investigate children's username and password understanding and practices from the perspective of both children and adults within the context of three security categories: credential composition (e.g. length of password), performance (e.g. time to enter), and credential mechanisms (e.g; a pattern or characters). We conducted a semi-structured interview with 22 children and an online survey with 33 adult participants (parents and teachers) to determine their practices and involvement in facilitating authentication for their children. Our study illustrates how children have a limited understanding of authentication, and that there are differences between children's and adult's understanding of good authentication and security practices, and what they actually do.

There are a variety of fitness technologies such as activity trackers, exergames and mobile applications available to promote physical activity. Based on our previous research, we found that children prefer having social interaction, a narrative and flexibility while interacting with such technologies. Other research has shown that persuasive displays encouraged adults towards physical activity. In this research, we present the initial results from a user study conducted on 16 children (ages 6-11) who used the Kidfit suite, a collection of mobile applications that combine and utilize the elements found from previous research to promote activity in children.

Obesity in children is a growing cause of concern as it affects more than 18% of children in the United States. Sedentary behaviour is one of the contributors to childhood obesity. Technological interventions like activity trackers and fitness games have been introduced to motivate both children and adults to be physically active. Most of these technologies encourage activity by making them aware of their activity levels. While awareness of current activity levels may help motivating adults, it can be difficult for children to understand their activity levels in terms of number of steps (the most common method used by adults). Instead children should be made aware of their activity levels via simpler and easier to understand technology. Within this context, we present KidLED -- an LED activity display that represents user's activity via a simple color display rather than numbers -- designed to simplify activity tracking for children.

Popular tools used to search for online resources are tuned to satisfy a broad category of users---primarily adults. Because children have specific needs, these tools may not always be successful in offering the right level of support in their quest for information. While search tools often provide query assistance, children still face many difficulties expressing their information needs in the form of a query. In this paper, we share results from our ongoing research work focused on understanding children's interactions with query suggestions and their preferences with respect to suggestions offered by a general-purpose strategy versus a counterpart designed exclusively for children. Our goal is to inform researchers and developers about when it is necessary to turn to technologies tailored exclusively for children and to further outline needs that should be addressed when it comes to designing query-formulation-related technology for children.

Resources for children are abundant, but finding suitable and appropriate resources for children in our information-rich society can be challenging. Due to this abundance of information, systems to find and recommend appropriate information for children are needed. Recommender systems (RS) for children have only recently begun to be researched. This area of research brings together researchers in education, child-development, computer scientists, designers, and more who address several issues including those related to education, algorithms, ethics, privacy, security. In this workshop we will: discuss and identify issues related to RS designed for children including challenges and limitations, discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and of critical importance work to build a community that explicitly looks at these critical issues. This workshop has a specific theme of educationally-related recommendations, but welcomes other child-oriented recommender system contributions.

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 1st Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems (KidRec) is taking place in Como, Italy August 27th, 2017 in conjunction with the ACM RecSys 2017 conference. The goals of the workshop are threefold: (1) discuss and identify issues related to recommender systems used by children including specific challenges and limitations, (2) discuss possible solutions to the identified challenges and plan for future research, and (3) build a community to directly work on these important issues.

This study explores the lifestyles of children with Selective Mutism (SM) to identify how to help children with SM communicate with those around them. Parents of Selectively Mute (SM2) children were interviewed to understand the challenges faced regarding SM and to examine why their children use technology. Children with and without SM were also interviewed through drawings to recognize their technology preferences. It was found that children frequently use technology like tablets for entertainment purposes and sometimes for interacting with others. Parents reported that their children become calm when they use technology and believed that technology could be used to promote speech. The findings from our study can act as a guide for speech-promoting technology. These findings indicate that an ideal technology is one that is inclusive and mobile and encourages stimulus fading and play therapy.

Identifying relevant code to perform maintenance or reuse tasks is becoming increasingly difficult. Software systems continue to grow and evolve, and developers often find themselves searching within thousands to even millions of lines of code to identify code relevant to a particular maintenance task. Automated solutions are vital to help developers become more efficient at locating code to be modified when performing maintenance tasks. In order to address this need and help developers reduce the time spent finding and searching for relevant code, we have built an Eclipse-plug in, CONQUER, that helps developers identify relevant results by providing critical insight and context of how query words are used in the code. CONQUER leverages advanced natural language (NL) information in the source code to group, sort and display the results in a meaningful way. In addition, CONQUER analyzes the frequency and co-occurrence of words in the method result set to provide alternative phrases that can help further refine the query. This rich contextual hierarchy helps the developer quickly determine if the query is correct and hone in on relevant results. The NL-based organization of results reduces the number of relevance judgments the developers need to make, and thus can reduce the overall time for a maintenance task.

As members of the HCI community we strive to design technologies that will benefit its intended users whether they are children, young adults, or older adults. The focus of this paper is to survey research related to technologies for families. In so doing we selected papers relating to technologies for families from all nine years of Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community (2003-2011) and then papers from the past 16 years of the larger Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) community (1996-2011). We present a survey of the design methods used in these papers. We identify trends in the technologies and identify the need for further exploration in the realm of participatory design for families.

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecting generations through cooperative design (co-design) methods that can enable idea construction and elaboration to flourish. Design techniques were adapted that ranged from low-tech prototyping and sticky-note feedback to distributed collaboration. The critical finding in this research was that children and older adults need not only time together to start the collaboration but also time apart to further the collaboration at a distance. This case study research reports on how our methods evolved and how others can apply these methods for their own work.

Concurrent collaboration is a critical skill for cognitive and social development. Tangible Flags is a system designed to facilitate collaboration and exploration, and bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. The system enables children to tag an item of interest in the real world with a flag, scan the flag, and create a corresponding digital artifact on a tablet computer. Another child can see the flag and its context, scan it, and view and modify the digital artifact in a form of collaboration. This paper describes a study that compares two Tangible Flag systems; a paper system and a tablet computer system. The study identifies several collaborative advantages of using the technology-based system, including increased awareness, more shared experiences, and longer time participating in activities.

This paper addresses how children can collaborate by leveraging the ubiquity of mobile devices. Specifically we investigate how children (ages 8--9) read and share children's stories using two collaborative configurations: content splitting and space sharing. Content splitting is where interface pieces (e.g. words, pictures) are split between two or more devices. Space sharing is where the same content (e.g. a document) is spread or shared across devices. The results point to an overall preference for the content splitting configuration. Supporting collaborative configurations on mobile devices can help overcome one of the most significant usability issues these devices face --- their limited screen space.

This paper discusses design iterations of Mobile Stories - a mobile technology that empowers children to collaboratively read and create stories. We present the design and discuss the impact of different collocated collaborative configurations for mobile devices including: content splitting and space sharing. We share design experiences that illustrate how Mobile Stories supports collaboration and mobility, and identify how the collocated collaborative configurations are best suited for reading and sharing tasks. We also identify how creative tasks foster more mobility and dynamic interactions between collaborators.

While there is a wealth of information about children's technology and the design processes used to create it, there is a dearth of information regarding how the children who participate in these design processes may be affected by their participation. In this paper, we motivate why studying this impact is important and look at the foundation provided by past research that touches on this topic. We conclude by briefly proposing methods appropriate for studying the impact of the design process on the children involved.

Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre-determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity of the open Internet and keyword-based interfaces for searching it, more critical analysis of the challenges children face today is needed. This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our research has revealed that although today's children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need.

In order to design for children with special needs, we need to design with children with special needs. The inclusionary model proposed in this paper suggests that appropriate involvement of children with special needs in the design process begins with the level of involvement a team expects from children, and is additionally influenced by the nature and severity of the child's disability and the availability and intensity of support available to the child.

Social interaction and collaboration are essential to the emotional and cognitive development of young children [40]. Constructionism [32] is a learning theory where children learn as they build or construct a public artifact. Creative activities that promote collaboration, especially those based on principles of constructionism, provide enhanced learning opportunities for young children. Mobile devices can support the learning experience as children can create artifacts in various contexts. The proposed research incorporates collaboration, constructionism, children, stories and mobile technologies; specifically investigating developmentally appropriate interfaces to support mobile collaboration for young children.

This paper describes research that investigates the use of a technology designed to support young children's collaborative artifact creation in outdoor environments. Collaboration while creating knowledge artifacts is an important part of children's learning, yet it can be limited while exploring outdoors. The construction of a joint representation often occurs in the classroom after the experience, where further investigation and observation of the environment is not possible. This paper describes a research study where collaborative technology was developed, used by children, and evaluated in an authentic setting --- a U.S. National Park.

The importance of play in young children's lives cannot be minimized. From teddy bears to blocks, children's experiences with the tools of play can impact their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Today, the tools of play include desktop computers and computer-enhanced physical environments. In this paper, we consider the merits of desktop and physical environments for young children (4-6 years old), by comparing the same content-infused game in both contexts. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used for data collection and analysis.

This paper sets forth a new technique for working with young children as design partners. Mixing ideas is presented as an additional Cooperative Inquiry design technique used to foster effective collaboration with young children (ages 4-6). The method emerged from our work with children on the Classroom of the Future project at the University of Maryland. A case study of this work is presented along with the implications of this method for future research.

ScreenCrayons is a system for collecting annotations on any type of document or visual information from any application. The basis for the system is a screen capture upon which the user can highlight the relevant portions of the image. The user can define any number of topics for organizing notes. Each topic is associated with a highlighting "crayon." In addition the user can supply annotations in digital ink or text. Algorithms are described that summarize captured images based on the highlight strokes so as to provide overviews of many annotations as well as being able to "zoom in" on particular information about a given note and the context of that note.

Cameras provide an appealing new input medium for interaction. The creation of camera-based interfaces is outside the skill-set of most programmers and completely beyond the skills of most interface designers. Image Processing with Crayons is a tool for creating new camera-based interfaces using a simple painting metaphor. A transparent layers model is used to present the designer with all of the necessary information. Traditional machine learning algorithms have been modified to accommodate the rapid response time required of an interactive design tool.

This paper describes a system for ubiquitous interaction that does not require users to carry any physical devices. In this system, the environment is instrumented with camera/processor combinations that watch users while protecting their privacy. Any visible surface can be turned into an interactive widget triggered by skin-colored objects. Light widgets are tied to the XWeb cross-modal interaction platform to empower them with interactive feedback.