Paper prototyping is an important tool for designing and testing early technologies during development. However, children have different relationships with technology and thus one cannot expect children to assess paper prototypes with the same mental model as adults. In this paper, we examine the effect of incorporating paper circuitry into low-fidelity paper prototypes, in order to add a level of interactivity that is not present in traditional paper prototypes. We conducted a study with 20 children ages 3 to 10 years old where participants used a cardboard prototype of a voice-controlled rocket on a pretend play mission to Mars. Children chose between buttons that lit up when pressed using paper circuitry, and buttons that did not light up, and explained their selections to the researchers. Our results show that children indeed preferred buttons augmented with paper circuitry, demonstrating more attention for and increased believability in the function of these buttons as well as the overall system. These findings show how designers can use paper circuitry to more effectively engage children while play-testing their paper prototypes.

Procedural art, or art made with programming, suggests opportunities to extend traditional arts like painting and drawing; however, this potential is limited by tools that conflict with manual practices. Programming languages present learning barriers and manual drawing input is not a first class primitive in common programming models. We hypothesize that by developing programming languages and environments that align with how manual artists work, we can build procedural systems that enhance, rather than displace, manual art. To explore this, we developed Dynamic Brushes, a programming and drawing environment motivated by interviews with artists. Dynamic Brushes enables the creation of ad-hoc drawing tools that transform stylus inputs to procedural patterns. Applications range from transforming individual strokes to behaviors that draw multiple strokes simultaneously, respond to temporal events, and leverage external data. Results from an extended evaluation with artists provide guidelines for learnable, expressive systems that blend manual and procedural creation.

Autonomous technology is becoming more prevalent in our daily lives. We investigated how children perceive this technology by studying how 26 participants (3-10 years old) interact with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Cozmo, and Julie Chatbot. We refer to them as "agents" in the context of this paper. After playing with the agents, children answered questions about trust, intelligence, social entity, personality, and engagement. We identify four themes in child-agent interaction: perceived intelligence, identity attribution, playfulness and understanding. Our findings show how different modalities of interaction may change the way children perceive their intelligence in comparison to the agents'. We also propose a series of design considerations for future child-agent interaction around voice and prosody, interactive engagement and facilitating understanding.

In today's fast-changing world, the ability to think and act creatively is more important than ever before. This panel will discuss tools, activities, and strategies for helping people develop as creative thinkers -- and how to scale those efforts to engage learners around the world. The panel will draw on examples involving learners of many different ages, in many different places, both in school and out.

Fifty years ago, Seymour Papert and colleagues developed Logo as the first programming language for children. Today, millions of children are participating in learn-to-code initiatives, but Papert's dream remains unfulfilled. Papert (who passed away last summer) saw programming not as a set of technical skills but as a new form of fluency - a new way for all children to explore, experiment, and express themselves. In this presentation, I will examine strategies for fulfilling Papert's dream. Drawing on examples from our Scratch online coding community, I will discuss how we can design programming environments and activities to help all children, from all backgrounds, to develop their thinking, develop their voices, and develop their identities.

This paper explores personal fabrication as a means of engaging new audiences in the creation of electronic devices, which play an ever-increasing role in our lives but which most people have little involvement in creating. We describe a six-session workshop in which eight participants made wifi-connected devices through the design and fabrication of custom printed circuit boards. We explore the implications of using components and processes analogous to those in commercial products, as opposed to the limited set of higher-level building blocks found in toolkits for hobbyist electronics. We highlight unique advantages and challenges of a personal fabrication approach. We explore the role of attitudes in identifying a suitable audience for these activities. We discuss insights into commercial electronic products offered by personal fabrication and explore its role in a world of mass-produced electronic devices. Finally, we suggest opportunities for future tools and technologies.

While sharing design projects is often seen as an essential component of participating in the maker community, ways in which young people can meaningfully participate have only begun to be supported. In this paper, we contribute an evaluation of Spin, a system for youth to capture and share animations of physical design projects. We describe how educators and students used Spin in 16 different K-12 makerspaces over 6 months, ranging from 2-hour-long workshops to extended 8-week engagements. Through our analysis of over 450 animations created during this timeframe and interviews and surveys with users, we outline the role of engagement, integration, and modularity for making documentation practice relevant and meaningful. We distill these ideas into design principles for creating documentation tools to support young makers.

We present the Scratch extension system, a toolkit that enables anyone to extend the vocabulary of the visual Scratch programming language through custom programming blocks written in JavaScript. The extension system is designed to (i) enable innovating on the Scratch programming language itself, in addition to innovating with it through projects, and (ii) enable the creation of new interest-driven pathways into Scratch programming. In this paper, we describe some of the prior work done in this space, our design and implementation, open questions and challenges, and some preliminary outcomes.

Despite the growth of online communities for sharing DIY projects, little research has focused on the methods by which project documentation is created and utilized -- that is, what techniques do designers use to document their work, how do they describe their work to others, and how do readers utilize design documentation in the context of their own projects? Through interviews and surveys with authors and readers of Instructables, we describe differences found in the practices of these two types of users in creating and applying design documentation. Based on the results, we identify design opportunities for members of the HCI community developing tools to better support people sharing creative work online.

The last session at this year's conference is an interactive panel discussion facilitated by Prof. Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab. The closing panel consists of leading university and industry researchers with strong opinions about digital technology and its relation to children and childhood. The topic for this session is the general question for this year's conference: "How can interaction with digital creative tools support child development?" The panel reflects on theoretical frameworks and challenges for the design of new digital technologies for a new generation of children, discussing new trajectories to support children's learning, wellbeing, and sensemaking. Panelists draw upon ideas from the papers, demos, tutorials, and keynotes presented at the IDC 2014 conference. IDC delegates have the opportunity to join the conversation, posing their own questions and comments. The closing panel concludes IDC 2014 by sharing ideas on how we can build tomorrow's technology together.

ScratchJr is a graphical programming language based on Scratch and redesigned for the unique developmental and learning needs of children in kindergarten to second grade. The creation of ScratchJr addresses the relative lack of powerful technologies for digital creation and computer programming in early childhood education. ScratchJr will provide software for children to create interactive, animated stories as well as curricula and online resources to support adoption by educators. This paper describes the goals and challenges of creating a developmentally appropriate programming tool for children ages 5-7 and presents the path from guiding principles and studies with young children to current ScratchJr designs and plans for future work.

This special session aims to provoke discussion about new strategies for engaging young people in computer programming, drawing on experiences of educators and young people using the Scratch programming environment and online communities. The session will combine several different formats, including research presentations and analysis by two members of the team that develops and supports Scratch, short presentations and demonstrations by five educators and young people working with Scratch, and discussions among audience participants.

Replay is a self-documenting construction kit for children to both share their designs with others and reflect on their own design process. Replay consists of a set of angular pieces that can sense their connection and orientation. A virtual model is rendered in real time as a design is constructed, and an on-screen playback interface allows users to view models from multiple perspectives and watch how a design was assembled. This paper describes the early development of Replay and describes potential directions for the documentation of physical designs.

Children engage in both structured and unstructured design activities with construction kits; for example, a child can choose to build predefined models with accompanying instructions or build their own models from scratch. This study explores the differences in children's play experience in both activities and looks specifically at how children respond to different instructional media. An exploratory study with six children between the ages of six and nine is described in which children used a paper-based, virtual, or physical model as a basis for creating a LEGO model. Children then had the opportunity to create a model of their own design. Through the study, the authors provide suggestions for enhanced virtual instruction guides and recommendations for combining the benefits of structured and unstructured play to create new design experiences for children.

Scratch is a visual programming environment that allows users (primarily ages 8 to 16) to learn computer programming while working on personally meaningful projects such as animated stories and games. A key design goal of Scratch is to support self-directed learning through tinkering and collaboration with peers. This article explores how the Scratch programming language and environment support this goal.

This article distills a discussion about the goals, mechanisms, and effects of three environments which aim to support the acquisition and development of computing concepts (problem solving and programming) in pre-University and non-technical students: Alice, Greenfoot, and Scratch. The conversation started in a special session on the topic at the 2010 ACM SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education and continued during the creation of the resulting Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Computing Education.

This paper describes Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed to facilitate media manipulation for novice programmers. We report on the Scratch programming experiences of urban youth ages 8-18 at a Computer Clubhouse 'an after school center' over an 18-month period. Our analyses of 536 Scratch projects collected during this time documents the learning of key programming concepts even in the absence of instructional interventions or experienced mentors. We discuss the motivations of urban youth who choose to program in Scratch rather than using one of the many other software packages available to them and the implications for introducing programming at after school settings in underserved communities.

This paper argues that the "kindergarten approach to learning" -- characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine -- is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are critical to success and satisfaction in today's society. The paper discusses strategies for designing new technologies that encourage and support kindergarten-style learning, building on the success of traditional kindergarten materials and activities, but extending to learners of all ages, helping them continue to develop as creative thinkers.

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools.

In this paper, we present ten guiding principles for designing construction kits for kids, informed by our experiences over the past two decades:* Design for Designers* Low Floor and Wide Walls* Make Powerful Ideas Salient -- Not Forced* Support Many Paths, Many Styles* Make it as Simple as Possible -- and Maybe Even Simpler* Choose Black Boxes Carefully* A Little Bit of Programming Goes a Long Way* Give People What They Want -- Not What They Ask For* Invent Things That You Would Want to Use Yourself* Iterate, Iterate -- then Iterate AgainWhile these principles apply especially to the development of construction kits, we believe that they could be useful for everyone who designs new technologies for kids.

This paper introduces a new framework for thinking about tangible interfaces in education, with specific focus on abstract problem domains.Manipulatives are physical objects specifically designed to foster learning. We offer a new classification of Manipulatives: "Froebel-inspired Manipulatives" (FiMs) and "Montessori-inspired Manipulatives" (MiMs). We argue that FiMs are design materials, fostering modeling of real-world structures, while MiMs foster modeling of more abstract structures. We show that our classification extends to computationally enhanced versions of manipulatives.We present Digital MiMs - computationally enhanced building blocks. We describe two prototypical members of the Digital MiMs class: FlowBlocks and SystemBlocks, physical, modular interactive systems that serve as general-purpose modeling and simulation tools for dynamic behavior. We present findings from qualitative studies, and conclude that digital MiMs are accessible to young children, engaging, and encourage learning of abstract structures of dynamic behavior through an iterative process of hands-on modeling, simulating, and analogizing.

We present the latest prototype of System Blocks, a new interactive learning environment that facilitates hands-on modeling and simulation of systems concepts. System Blocks, by making processes visible and manipulable, can help students learn about the core concepts of systems at a younger age. K-12 schools rarely introduce students to core concepts of systems such as interconnectedness, positive and negative feedback, stocks and flows, or time delay. These concepts are considered "too hard" for pre-college students. Using System Blocks, 5th grade students with no prior instruction in systems were able to model and simulate systems, to interact with concepts such as net-flow dynamics and positive feedback, and to successfully connect the simulations to real-life examples.

In this paper, we introduce Folk Computing: an approach for using technology to support co-present community building inspired by the concept of folklore. We also introduce a new technology, called “i-balls,” whose design helped fashion this approach. The design of the i-ball environment is explained in terms of our effort to simultaneously preserve what works about folklore while also using technology to expand its power as a medium for community building.

In many educational settings, manipulative materials (such as Cuisenaire Rods and Pattern Blocks) play an important role in children's learning, enabling children to explore mathematical and scientific concepts (such as number and shape) through direct manipulation of physical objects.Our group at de MJT Media Lab has developed a new generation of "digital manipulatives"-computationallyenhanced versions of traditional children's toys.These new manipulatives enable children to explore a new set of concepts (im particular, "systems concepts" such as feedback and emergence) that have previously been considered "too advanced" for children to learn.In this paper, we discuss four of our digital manipulatives-computationallyaugmented versions of blocks, beads, balls, and badges.

Article Free Access Share on Meme tags and community mirrors: moving from conferences to collaboration Authors: Richard Borovoy MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Fred Martin MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Sunil Vemuri MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Mitchel Resnick MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Brian Silverman MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile , Chris Hancock MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 159–168https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289490Online:01 November 1998Publication History 112citation991DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations112Total Downloads991Last 12 Months46Last 6 weeks10 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

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The growing interest in Artificial Life is part of a broader intellectual movement toward decentralized models and metaphors. But even as decentralized ideas spread through the culture, there is a deep-seated resistance to these ideas. People have strong attachments to centralized ways of thinking: they often assume centralized control where none exists. New types of computational tools and construction kits are needed to help people move beyond this “centralized mindset.” Perhaps most important are new tools and activities for children, to help them develop new ways of looking at the world.