Children today are surrounded by media characters who populate their experiences with video, audio, games, books, clothing, toys, robots, and interactive platforms -- all with growing potential for personalization, adaptivity, and intelligence. In this paper, we describe our experience designing for "parasocial" relations between children and characters using video, interactive media, and artificial intelligence (AI), with reference to related empirical research, and a theoretical model and framework within which to understand these phenomena. The goal of this paper is to spark discussion about the future of character design in the IDC community, with a view to guiding research, development, theory, and policy recommendations; and, facilitating collaboration across disciplines and industries in order to benefit children's learning and healthy development.

Electric Agents is a multi-player game that uses augmented reality on mobile phones to facilitate in-room collaboration and promote joint media engagement around interactive educational television content in the home. Joint media engagement describes 'collaborative' consumption of media and has potential learning benefits. Our research examines whether technology can support joint media engagement, through the use of a series of prototypes that combine handheld augmented reality with web-based video. In pilot testing, sibling play patterns showed evidence of the kind of in-room collaboration and joint media engagement that previous research has shown to facilitate children in making sense of media content.

Electric Agents is a cross-media game that presents new ways for children to actively engage with television content. In the game Manny, a member of the Pranksters, steals words out of the mouth of Hector, a member of The Electric Company team, and hides them to prevent the story from progressing. Children collaborate through a mobile augmented reality experience to find and collect the missing vocabulary words relevant to the show narrative. The players return the stolen words back to the show by "throwing" the words towards the television using their mobile devices. This blend of a narrative and a game strives to make educational television content more engaging and participatory while fostering collaborative play and use of specific vocabulary words.

We introduce Family Story Play, a system that supports grandparents to read books together with their grandchildren over the Internet. Family Story Play is designed to improve communication across generations and over a distance, and to support parents and grandparents in fostering the literacy development of young children. The interface encourages active child participation in the book reading experience by combining a paper book, a sensor-enhanced frame, video conferencing technology, and video content of a Sesame Street Muppet (Elmo). Results with users indicate that Family Story Play improves child engagement in long-distance communication and increases the quality of interaction between young children and distant grandparents. Additionally, Family Story Play encourages dialogic reading styles that are linked with literacy development. Ultimately, reading with Family Story Play becomes a creative shared activity that suggests a new kind of collaborative story telling.

There is a growing body of research on usability and interaction design with and for children using computers [1, 2, 3]. Less is known about interaction design and usability as applied to children's use of mobile devices. Sesame Workshop has redesigned a web-based literacy intervention for young readers to run on the Apple iPod Touch. We report on design challenges in moving from large screens and mouse-based interactions to small screens and touch-based interactions, and make interface and interaction design recommendations based on the results of our prototyping and research with children.