While Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research frequently reports successful outcomes, challenges and failures in studies conducted in school context are rarely examined in detail. This paper addresses this gap through a collective reflection on when and how research with children in school contexts can be considered successful, and what challenges threaten such success. Based on decades of CCI experience from fifteen researchers across multiple countries, the study used a structured, multi-phase process informed by confessional research and child-centered ethics. The analysis identifies nine aspects of success across three areas (stakeholder experience, data generation, and children’s engagement) alongside fifteen recurring challenges organised into seven areas. We also map the relationships between successes and challenges, revealing ethically consequential tensions often overlooked in published accounts. The paper offers practical guidance, an analytical vocabulary, and a reflective method to foster more transparent and ethical CCI research in school settings.

The Art and Craft of Capturing Children’s Experiences in IDC course focuses on evaluation studies with children and presents three graduated studies along with all their planning, tools and observations whilst also challenging attendees to go beyond each by applying a growth mindset to query what can be done better - in this way the craft of working with children is mapped out as a continuum in which skills develop in innovation, the use of tools, and in the products of research. At the same time, a set of provocations / top tips are given as art forms built from curated conversations with IDC influencers that both convey a simple message but also a deeper meaning - as is the nature of art. The course is therefore suitable for all levels, and for researchers and practitioners. It is a new course specifically designed for the IDC community but builds on similar courses that have been held at CHI.

How can we leverage taste expectations to create novel food-based experiences for children? Eating is an embodied process that engages multiple senses. Cross-sensory correspondences may offer educational and recreational opportunities to design interactive applications that encourage diversifying encounters with food. We present a study with 64 children (ages 10–11) who explored eight textured materials hidden inside mystery “food” boxes and reported both their expected tastes and willingness to eat. Our findings provide evidence of touch–taste cross-sensory correspondences in children – sweetness with weak-hard-brittle and strong-soft-brittle materials, and saltiness with a weak-soft brittle material – and how these mappings influenced children’s openness to unknown foods. These results provide empirical grounding for cross-sensory interaction design with children, demonstrating how texture could scaffold curiosity and learning. We outline design implications for cross-sensory food interfaces, non-edible public exhibits, and playful educational technologies that could broaden eating experiences and enable new forms of virtual food interaction.

In this paper, we use the Child-Centred Ethics framework to critically reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of twelve (2-4 year) projects with children (ages 2-18 years) in Finland, the UK, India, Japan, and the USA. Our analysis reveals diverse ethical challenges and experiences: adapting materials based on the abilities, interests and agendas of the children, teachers, and schools, considering consent and assent as continuous processes, and exploring impacts beyond the project duration. We also discuss handling data ownership among participants and international collaborators, and managing difficult situations that arise, such as, participants pushing the boundaries of technology and people, technical breakdowns, and in situ negotiations of roles among teachers and researchers. We use our analysis to extend the CCE Framework in two distinct ways; incorporating adult stakeholders and impacts beyond a projects’ lifecycle. Our work contributes to research on ethics in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research, addressing how to plan, implement, and create an impact in CCI projects with children.

Children's screen use draws much attention from the media with the general narrative being that something needs to be done.In the IDC community, and beyond, many interventions and innovations are proposed and studies are carried out and report positive effects in many cases.One omission is in studies that report the first hand experience of children, another is in designing for children to take more control over their own screen use by managing their feelings and emotions and self regulating.In this work in progress paper we describe a small study that explored children's emotions as they exited from a game.The contribution here is the method that we present as being easy to manage, fun to operate and reliable in its outcomes.We describe the work and suggest some further uses and extensions.

Metaphors improve communication between children and adults, which can be challenging due to differences in experiences. Cross-sensory metaphors convey qualities associated with one sense using terms from another, e.g. a “sharp smell'' and could thus improve generational communication by bridging differences in sensory cognition. We observed children (8-11yrs, n=65), young adults (18-24yrs, n=51) and older adults (60-85yrs, n=38) playing Sense-O-Nary, a variation of Pictionary where players construct and interpret cross-sensory metaphors, and analysed differences in metaphor type, degree of elaboration, and association strategies. We found that children relied on ``familiar experiences'' for metaphor construction, while adults used more diverse association strategies. Degree of elaboration was consistent across ages for tactile and visual stimuli but differed for olfactory stimuli. All groups used ``active'' metaphors most commonly, but children showed more use of ``implicit'', ``similes'', and ``personification''. We present designs that demonstrate how these characterisations could be leveraged to improve intergenerational communication.

Following a review of papers in the ACM DL on ethics and children, this paper shows the growth of interest in this area, summarises the literature found, and then, using detail from 26 papers that offer practical advice, distils a Child Centred Ethics Framework that maps literature onto ethical concerns in relation to the practical application of ethics with children. The framework offers questions and solutions for researchers from the first inception of a project to the dissemination of the results back to the children. The framework is offered as an adjunct to an ethics / IRB document in that it places the child’s experience at the centre of decision-making allowing fuller exploration of aspects like assent, anonymity, inclusion and contribution. As a practical resource that researchers can use, the framework is presented as a living document waiting to be owned by the community.

This work in progress builds on the work on ‘Small CCI’ working with children below the age of 5. The purpose of this study was to compare children's engagement and experience with three classroom activities over a three-week period. Eight children aged three and four years old took part in each activity (learning on tablet devices, free play in the home corner, and story time with their teacher) each week and were asked to complete a pre and post-test Smileyometer to rate each activity for fun, followed by a ‘This or That’ at the end of each session. The children's engagement was also measured by the research team using the Leuven scale. The results indicate that children of this age range can complete these evaluation tools. The children indicated that for all weeks they found the learning on the tablet devices the most fun and every child ranked the tablet activity as the best each week using the ‘This or That’ method. The researchers marked engagement the highest on the tablet devices for two of the three weeks. We note these results as unsurprising but suggest that they help us to understand the power of digital when considered in such settings and propose that researchers need to adjust for this when evaluating digital products with children of this age.

In a ten-week project with nine school classes across the North West of England we explored ocean health with IT-enabled solutions. We describe the activities carried out under headings of participation, learning, and design. Participation activities, which included recruitment, focused on setting the parameters for children’s inclusion and ensuring they understood how data might be used, and that handing in artefacts to the research team was their choice. Learning happened in an environment of contextual relevance that enabled children to develop data literacy whilst we could explore relevant research questions. Design was a journey from individual to whole-class design, while developing engineering thinking and social cohesion. We reflect on the journey showing that children learned from the activities and acquired a new enthusiasm for their local coastline. We reflect on how our inclusive approach can broaden HCI research to wider communities of children and encourage others to apply our model.

Metaphors enrich language by allowing us to express complex ideas through familiar concepts, enhancing both understanding and creativity in communication. Crossmodal metaphors are metaphors where one sensory modality is understood in terms of another (e.g, a sharp smell). Crossmodality is an integral part of how we make sense of and create meaning about the world. However, there is a lack of research on how children generate crossmodal metaphors and the interpretation of such metaphors. We present Sense-O-Nary, a game we designed to explore how children react when asked to create crossmodal metaphors in a novel environment. Children are presented with one sensory input and then asked to describe it using a different sense, for another team to guess what the original sensory input is. We engaged children (n=65, aged 8-10) to play this crossmodal metaphor generation game. We qualitatively analysed children’s exchange of crossmodal metaphors to define a set of crossmodal association strategies and then use this to categorise the metaphors they created. We discuss how engaging with crossmodal metaphors can enhance children’s linguistic development and how our findings can inform the design of interactions that involve multiple senses.

This paper introduces a novel approach in the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field that examines how children’s feedback on experimental stimuli can enhance research design, using emotion research as a case study. Our study utilizes interactive vignettes where children act as ’emotion detectives’, providing insights into their emotional articulation, followed by elicited feedback on the stimuli and research process. This method refines emotional vocabulary elicitation techniques and empowers children by incorporating their perspectives into the experimental design. The core of this research lies in establishing a participatory framework for involving children as evaluators, thereby proposing changes within the realm of experimental methodologies. We hope that this could serve as a tool to researchers studying children using an experimental setup.

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) is predominantly studied with school aged children. Working with preschool children, generally unable to read or write, involves addressing many challenges around planning, recruitment, and interpretation of findings. There are few examples in the literature of the challenges faced when conducting evaluations of technology with preschool children and very few evaluations conducted for commercial software companies. Our case study paper describes a six-week, twelve session, evaluation study of a commercial app (Lingokids) with children aged three and four in two nursery (preschool / kindergarten) schools. We describe challenges we met and describe how we adapted our plans to fit the context. We show how we were able to explore engagement and learning without gathering any personal data. With our practical tips and reflections, we hope our work will encourage others to work with young children in ways that respect their limited ability to understand assent and participation.

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

It is widely understood within the field of HCI that participation in research and design activities, especially by children, requires careful planning and execution. Whilst the HCI community, and related groups like IDC, have gone some way to ensure aspects such as the selection and participation of children in research and design work is considered carefully, there has not yet been careful consideration, or reporting, of how children get to find out what has happened to the research that they have contributed to. In this paper we describe how we worked with children in overseas contexts and actively reported back to them the outcomes from the work they contributed to. We describe how our desire to report back influenced the planning the analysis of the data to ensure the results could be packaged in a child friendly way. We offer a simple to use checklist for practitioners and researchers to follow and a challenge for the IDC community to incorporate planned or actual feedback into the reporting of studies.

There are many ways to look at the efficacy and value of the inclusion of children in design activities within HCI. Whilst the experience of participation can be highly beneficial for children, there is value, even if it is only to confirm the merit of the children's participation, in looking at the process of ideation and in considering to what extent children can ideate. Whilst design is by nature untethered, being able to capture and consider the diversity of design ideas across multiple design teams and to look at how such ideas are developed, can facilitate reflection and potentially improve practice. This work explores the diversity of ideas and the iterative development of ideas during the incremental design of a mobile game with 26 teen informants working in small groups over four design sessions. A method to visualize the evolution of ideas across design sessions is presented. Groups’ behaviors are mapped to three positions according to how conservative and how innovative the participants were. We explore the implications of our work for practitioners and researchers.

We explore the question of how child designers can provide design ideas for technology that might reduce the marginalisation that can be experienced by some of their peers. To do this, we introduce the idea of Expanded Proxy Design that moves beyond the notion of "proxies as people" in design, to guide methods for engaging children into thinking about design ideas for a group that exists at some distance from their own experience. We outline three case studies where we made use of such methods. First, we consider expanded proxies in the context of technology and newly immigrant children who are unable to speak in English. Second, we consider the case of designing technology for children with and without visual impairments. Finally, we consider designing playful experiences for children with different temperaments. We reflect on the extent to which this expanded notion of proxies can be used as a meaningful vehicle for overcoming marginalisation and exclusion when children with different abilities design for each other. And we suggest ways to characterise, develop and refine expanded proxy design methods in this broader sense.

This paper reports on a study to understand the effects the MemoLine visualization tool has on the interview process for evaluating long term user experience with children. Modifications were made to the MemoLine to try to improve consistency in reporting periods of no play. A within-subject design study was conducted using the MemoLine with interviews, and just interviews, of a suite of educational games over a 12-week period. The participants were 22 children, aged between 8 and 9 years, from a UK primary school. Three constructs were analyzed: Game Play, Learning and Ease of Use. The results showed that using the MemoLine's visualization tool did not aid the children to recall past experience in comparison to just conducting an interview. In addition, the changes to the tool did not appear to aid consistency when reporting periods of no play and the appropriateness of the MemoLine is critically reflected upon.

Tablet games are flooding the market and large numbers of these are designed for children. The expansion of quantity has not seen an associated expansion of quality. Studies of the usability of tablet games for children typically take place in laboratory settings and fail to understand the context of use. This paper describes a study of 'at home' use of tablet games with children and their families that sought to examine how such games were played and how parents managed such game play. The children who participated in the study had cognitive, sensory or physical needs and these multiple needs brought many difficulties to the surface for parents mediating tablet use. A thematic analysis using four codes was applied to bring findings from diaries and interviews. Challenges for general tablet game design have emerged around designing for family routines, designing for working together, and designing to scaffold children's understanding.

The development and evaluation of prototypes is an important part of game development. This study aimed to establish whether the form factor, either paper or an iPad, would affect children's ratings of a prototype game. The 42 participants were aged between 7 and 11 and used the Fun Toolkit to measure user experience. The results showed that the form factor had little influence over their overall ratings of the game concept. However, the children rated the aesthetics higher on the paper version compared to the iPad, despite the graphics being identical, suggesting a potential effect of the form factor on this aspect of the prototype. Participants were also asked if they would pay to download the game as a measure of engagement, but their comments indicated that parental controls might influence the results when evaluating monetary transactions with children.

To encourage ethical practices in participatory design with children the CHECk tool was created. This paper reports on an expert review of the CHECk tool and a validating case study. Four main challenges to the CHECk tool are identified: (1) how to inform children on the research and their role herein, (2) distinguishing between project values and designer or researcher's personal values, (3) accounting for the dynamic nature and social constructedness of values in design, and (4) the emergence of values in all stakeholders including child design partners. We advocate complementing CHECk with interactive storytelling and show how this narrative can be used to not only inform participation and achieve ethical symmetry, but also to negotiate values with child design partners.

Participatory Design (PD) in various guises is a popular approach with the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community. In studying it as a method very little work has considered the fundamentals of participation, namely how children choose to participate and how their ideas are included and represented. This paper highlights ethical concerns about PD with children within the context of information needed to consent. In helping children understand participation in PD, a central aspect is the necessity to help children understand how their design ideas are used which itself challenges researchers to seek a fair and equitable process that is describable and defensible. The TRAck (tracking, representing and acknowledging) Method, is described as an initial process that could meet this need. This is evaluated, in two forms, in a PD study with 84 children. The TRAck Method encouraged careful scrutiny of designs and allowed the researchers to distil useful design ideas although these were maybe not the most imaginative. There is a trade off between the limitations of applying such a process to PD against the benefits of ensuring fullinformed involvement of children.

There is growing emphasis on teenagers to adopt healthy behaviours and sustainable lifestyles. Innovative interventions delivered through pervasive technology or the internet are increasingly viewed as effective ways to motivate and help people change their behaviour. However, delivering interventions to change teenager's attitude or behaviour via pervasive systems need to be designed specifically for the target population. When working with teenagers relevant, teen-centric and appropriate activities need to be used. The aim of this workshop is to discuss and develop interdisciplinary research in the design of technology for behaviour change interventions in the teenage population.

This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how to convey the idea of OUIs, how to facilitate the pupils to design OUIs and how to interpret the OUI design ideas. To convey the ideas of OUI, the Obstructed Theatre method, used in other studies with children and teenagers, was used. In this work, the salient features of the OUI conveyed in the theatre were: its malleability, its potential to bend and change shape, its association with the body and its novelty. To facilitate the design, three scenarios of increasing user interface complexity were conveyed in the theatre; and three different media (i) slime and pipe cleaners, (ii) PlayDoh and small Lego bricks, (iii) fabric and sticky shapes that afforded the creation of designs representing future organic interactive technologies were deployed. To enable the design team to make sense of the resulting designs, a Comic Strip approach was used to capture the changes in the designs as they demonstrated interaction. The paper explores this work from three perspectives; first, the effectiveness of the Obstructed Theatre approach to convey requirements of OUIs, secondly, the effectiveness of the three media used in the design sessions to encourage design solutions for OUIs and thirdly, the quality and relevance of the design ideas generated in the sessions and communicated to the design team using the Comic Strips and their applicability to other contexts. The paper concludes with some thoughts on methods and materials that could be used to encourage design ideas for OUIs and offers some of the participants more innovative ideas for the research and development community.

In this paper, we report the findings from a study investigating children's responses to technologies they have within their home by comparing them with the responses given by their parents.

Over the past decade many new evaluation methods have emerged for evaluating user experience with children, but the results of these studies have tended to be reported in isolation of other techniques. This paper reports on a comparative analysis of 2 user experience evaluations methods with children. A within-subject design was adopted using 20 children aged between 7 and 8. The children played 2 different games on a tablet PCs and their experiences of each were captured using 2 evaluation methods which have been validated with children: the Fun Toolkit and This or That. The results showed that the Fun Toolkit and This or That method yielded similar results and were able to establish a preference for one game over the other. However, there were some inconsistencies between the results of individual tools within the Fun toolkit and some of the constructs being measured in the This or That method. Further research will try to identify any ordering effects within each method and redundancies within the questions.

Abstract Motivation: We have created a suite of Java-based software to better provide taxonomic assignments to DNA sequences. We anticipate that the program will be useful for protistologists, virologists, mycologists and other microbial ecologists. The program relies on NCBI utilities including the BLAST software and Taxonomy database and is easily manipulated at the command-line to specify a BLAST candidate's query-coverage or percent identity requirements; other options include the ability to set minimal consensus requirements (%) for each of the eight major taxonomic ranks (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, …) and whether to consider lower scoring candidates when the top-hit lacks taxonomic classification. Availability: http://bergelson.uchicago.edu/software/marta Contact: [email protected]; [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

We describe an investigation into the relationship between usability and fun in educational software designed for children. Twenty-five children aged between 7 and 8 participated in the study. Several evaluation methods were used; some collected data from observers, and others collected reports from the users. Analysis showed that in both observational data, and user reports, ratings for fun and usability were correlated, but that there was no significant correlation between the observed data and the reported data. We discuss the possible reasons for these findings, and describe a method that was successful in eliciting opinions from young children about fun and usability.