Peer Reviewed

Financial literacy is the use of knowledge, skills, and behaviors around managing financial resources. Despite its importance, less is known from a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and child-computer interaction perspective about what financial literacy means for youth, especially the role of digital technologies. We examine children's perspectives of financial literacy and digital technologies through a study of nine participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 – 11) centered around ideating, evaluating, and designing technologies for children's finances. Our co-design findings demonstrate that children's relationship to money can be quite complex in the digital world. Empirically, we report three inductive themes that demonstrate the role that technology plays in children's financial literacy. Theoretically, we argue the need for child-computer interaction research to engage more in financial literacy for children. Finally, we reflect on co-designing for financial literacy, technology, and children.

Children’s online co-design has become prevalent since COVID-19. However, related research focuses on insights gained across several shorter-term projects, rather than longitudinal investigations. To explore longitudinal co-design online, we engaged in participatory design with children (ages 8 - 12) for 20 sessions in two years on a single project: an online collaboration platform with tabletop telepresence robots. We found that (1) the online technology space required children to play a role as technology managers and troubleshooters, (2) the home setting shaped online social dynamics, and (3) providing children the ability to choose their design techniques prevented gridlock from situational uncertainties. We discuss how each finding resulted from interplay between our long-term technology design and online co-design processes. We then present insights about the future of online co-design, a conceptual model for longitudinal co-design online, and describe opportunities for further longitudinal online co-design research to generate new methods, techniques, and theories.