In this paper, we describe a series of workshops conducted with first grade pupils (6-7 years old) and their teacher. These workshops aim at introducing pupils to typeface design to create a class typeface to be used both on computer and on posters. While describing the whole sequence of activities pupils engaged in, we intend to open new perspectives on "making" for general education, considering its social and cultural dimensions. Throughout this report, we highlight how such making activity can support (1) pupils' acknowledgment of complex relations between materials, people and places, (2) the connection of schools to new environments and renewed agency perspectives, and (3) the development of a class culture.

Creativity and imagination play a key role in human learning and development. This workshop aims at promoting the discussion on interactive technologies that enhance children's creativity. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to: what is creativity in the first place, and how to design, develop and evaluate technologies that enrich children's expressive power, as well as their abilities to think "laterally" (out of the box). We seek contribution on the design of tools that encourage young people to explore differently their environment, to capture their experience of the world, to crystallize and transform these occurrences in a creative way.

Like literacy itself, access to digital media both reflects and shapes the ways people play and learn, and more generally, how individuals and groups perceive themselves, relate to others, treat things, and occupy space. We see both opportunities and risks in today's infatuation for all things digital. As organizers of the IDC 2009 workshop on "Digital Technologies and Marginalized Youth: Reducing the Gap", our focus is on the empowerment and integration of marginalized youth. We look at how marginalized youth adopt digital media and what's in it for them. We summarize all the accepted position papers in an attempt to draw lessons useful to researchers, educators, and practitioners. To conclude, we draw from Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" as a useful framework to rethink some of the prerequisites that may help marginalized youth to find their voices while, at the same time, speaking the tongue of others (in particular those in power). Getting "lost in translations" is what paves the ways to many youngsters social exclusion.

Given the fracturing of virtual and physical spaces, young people are less involved in their local surrounding spaces. Yet, investing the community space is related to sense of community and elicits social inclusion. We explore the complex relations among social inclusion, sense of community, spaces and artifacts through a case study on pinholes. Pinholes appeared to be powerful semiotics artifacts, simple to use, that allow equally empowered groups of participants of different ages and cultures to jointly explore, produce and share meanings about their territories and identities.

This paper discusses what it means to be literate in the digital age, and what it takes to become so. Children's narrative and notational skills, we contend, co-evolve and feed one another. Drawing from three case studies (POGO, Tell-Tale, Sprite), we offer insights into the design and evaluation of narrative environments for young children.

This paper discusses the effects of introducing new distributed and active instruments on narrative activities in a school environment. We address the issue of how the Pogo instruments change children's activity when they invent stories. The results enable us to compare the way the activity is carried out, both in its conventional context and with the Pogo instruments, mainly along three main lines of investigation: the collective dimension, the use of space and the structure of the narrative. The results also show that using the instruments increase the collective or group dimension of the creative process, particularly the role diversification and participation of the children. These instruments support children's efforts to structure narratives and thereby produce richer stories. This research was carried out within the Pogo Project by a multidisciplinary team that included interactive design and user-centered approaches within the EC I3 programme on ‘Exploring New Learning Futures for Children’.

A cognitive simulation model (COSIMO) which simulates the behavior of an operator controlling a complex system during the management of accidents is described. Particular attention is paid to the theoretical foundations of the model, to its computational implementation, and to a number of simulations of man-machine system interactions. The approach followed in COSIMO is to build a structure for the various kinds of cognitive functions that are performed by an operator in complex environments, e.g., information seeking, pattern recognition and diagnosis, monitoring, planning, and acting on the system. For the implementation of COSIMO a blackboard architecture has been chosen. This architecture offers enough flexibility and modularity for modeling the overall state of the human and of the environment.>