Educational robots have been increasingly used in early childhood settings to introduce young children to programming and computational thinking (CT). However, less is known about how algorithmic thinking (AT), a core CT skill, develops through children’s embodied interaction with such tangible tools. Using multimodal analysis on approximately 30 hours of video recordings of task-based interviews with five pairs of 5-6-year-old children, this study examines how their bodily actions and interactions with the physical environment shape their AT during Bee-Bot programming activities. The findings identify three embodied forms of early AT—incremental, transitional, and systematic—which unfold dynamically through young children’s use of tapping, manipulating, and tracing actions to support algorithm construction and intertwined mathematical reasoning. From a child-centred, non-deficit lens, we also interpret young children’s encounters with recurrent challenges as meaningful embodied sense-making rather than cognitive deficits, as they draw on familiar sensorimotor experiences to understand turn commands and navigate step-counting difficulties by reorganising the environment to reduce cognitive demands. This study contributes to the literature by enriching our understanding of the embodied nature of early AT and offering pedagogical implications for its integration into early mathematics education through embodied approaches.
This study examines the role of augmented reality (AR)–enhanced storybooks as peritextual support in shaping children's reading experiences when working with low-peritext printed texts. Adopting a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design with mixed methods, the study was conducted with 60 third-grade students attending a public primary school during the 2024–2025 academic year. Participants were assigned to an experimental group using AR-enhanced storybooks and a control group using traditional illustrated storybooks. Data were collected through the Reading Motivation Scale, the Attitude Toward AR Books Scale, and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data were analyzed using dependent samples t-tests, repeated-measures ANOVA, and descriptive statistics, while qualitative data were examined through descriptive analysis. The findings indicate that the use of AR-enhanced storybooks did not result in a statistically significant change in overall reading motivation; however, students in the experimental group demonstrated a stable motivational pattern over time, in contrast to a decline observed in the control group. In addition, students' attitudes toward AR-supported storybooks improved significantly and were sustained at follow-up. Qualitative findings further revealed that students in the experimental group described their reading experiences in terms of enjoyment, engagement, understanding, and recall, whereas students in the control group emphasized primarily visual and aesthetic features such as colorfulness and illustrations. These results suggest that AR functions not merely as a motivational stimulus but as a peritextual support mechanism that enriches meaning-making processes and compensates for limited peritextual features in printed storybooks. Overall, the study highlights the potential of AR-enhanced storybooks to support children's reading experiences by extending the peritextual affordances of traditional texts, particularly in contexts where visual and structural cues are limited.
This paper presents Colorpecker, a tangible user interface (TUI) designed to support fourth-grade children's observational drawing, with a particular focus on color cognition. The study examines how specific interactional affordances shape children's perceptual exploration and decision-making during drawing.A four-week classroom study compared students using Colorpecker with peers using a stylus-only digital drawing setup. Drawing on the distinction between epistemic and pragmatic actions, the analysis combined behavioral coding of the drawing process, pre- and post-test object descriptions, and expert evaluations of drawing outcomes. Results showed that while basic drawing execution behaviors were comparable across groups, students using Colorpecker engaged more frequently in epistemic actions related to object inspection and color exploration. These behaviors were accompanied by significant gains in color-related descriptive vocabulary and higher ratings in drawing completeness, whereas differences in shape and composition remained descriptive rather than inferential.The findings indicate that tangible interaction can support observational drawing by enabling reversible experimentation, perceptual comparison, and sustained attention to subtle color relations, without altering core drawing execution skills. The study contributes an integrative account of how tool-mediated epistemic actions link perceptual exploration, verbal articulation, and product-level outcomes in children's drawing, and highlights the role of TUIs in supporting color cognition within art education contexts.
Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) remains a widespread concern, with both offline and online grooming threatening children's safety. While game-based interventions exist, the potential of gamification in CSA prevention is still underexplored. This paper presents the Cesagram platform—a gamified educational tool designed for students aged 11 and up, involving parents and educators to foster awareness, prevention, and open dialogue. Combining narrative-based learning with collaborative game mechanics, the platform was evaluated through 24 workshops held in Lithuania, Greece, and Italy with 306 students and 138 adults. Participants engaged in both theoretical sessions and platform use, with results showing improved recognition of grooming tactics, reduced belief in CSA-related myths (especially among girls), and support for parent–child communication. The study highlights the value of integrating gamification with CSA prevention education and reflects on key lessons learned in designing engaging and effective interventions in this area and for sensitive topics more broadly.
In this work, we take an asset-based approach to history learning, exploring how to design activities that reflect and build on who students are and help them to connect to disciplinary content. Prior research has shown that when students see connections between their interests and curricular content, they are more likely to engage deeply and learn the target content. We propose network visualization-based activities as a promising avenue for supporting students to 1) share about themselves in a way that makes connections possible; and 2) make relational and content connections while learning disciplinary practices. We examine data from five eighth-grade world history classes (n = 89), analyzing two network visualization activities in which students created networks surrounding Ancient Greece and their connections to it. In the Mythological Connections network, students displayed how they related to characters in Greek mythology, and in the Voting network, students voiced and voted on changes they wanted to see made in their classroom using both Ancient Greece and modern-day United States voting systems. We conducted content analyses of the networks, interaction analysis of interactional video data, and thematic analysis of student post-interviews to understand how these activities supported students to share and connect. We found there was variability in how students approached the activities, with each network design supporting different kinds of sharing and connection. We see this work as contributing to conversations around centering student identity, interest, voice, and agency—and propose sharing and connecting as design goals that support the intertwining of these concepts.
Education providers, including schools, government organisations and not-for-profit groups increasingly provide primary-school-aged children with access to digital environments for learning in diverse content areas. Digital environments for children can include extended reality, websites, digital games and learning management systems. Children's learning in digital environments is contingent on quality design, including embedded concepts of learning and understanding of user experience. It can be difficult for education providers to readily recognise elements of quality design in the digital environments they design, build or purchase for children. This paper reports the findings of a scoping review of the literature focussed on learning concepts derived from an understanding of the importance of the child, caregiver and teacher triad in children's learning, including play-based learning, co-learning and teacher pedagogies. The review confirms many existing design elements as important in digital environments for children, such as meaning-making, problem-solving and engagement, but further identifies metagaming and goal setting by caregivers as potentially useful. Eleven design elements and aligned principles are identified to support education providers in decision-making about the provision of quality digital environments for children's learning.
Parents' online sharing of young children has become widespread, raising concerns about privacy, autonomy and the psychological mechanisms that sustain posting behaviors. This study examined sharenting among parents of preschoolers by assessing its associations with gratification needs, parental psychological symptoms and unilateral decision-making. A cross-sectional survey of 256 parents revealed that most engaged in moderate sharenting. Higher sharenting corresponded to markedly greater cognitive, affective, integrative and escape-related gratifications. Sharenting was positively associated with a parent-centric decision stance and with psychological symptom severity, particularly interpersonal sensitivity, psychoticism and paranoid ideation, suggesting that emotional and regulatory processes meaningfully shape posting practices. Educational level showed no association with sharenting, and brief awareness trainings did not reduce sharing. Findings indicate that sharenting in early childhood is largely gratification-driven and intertwined with parental symptomatology and limited recognition of children's decision authority. Given the developmental implications of constructing a digital identity before children can assent, interventions should move beyond information-based awareness efforts and incorporate skills-based digital privacy guidance, emotion-regulation support and structured, developmentally appropriate involvement of children in sharing decisions. These results underscore sharenting as a psychologically influenced digital parenting behavior requiring targeted clinical and public-health strategies.
This paper presents the development of MoDa (Modeling with Data), a free, web-based, open-source platform that integrates agent-based computational modeling with real-world data analysis for middle school science education. MoDa was co-designed with teachers over four years, to support authentic scientific inquiry by enabling students to construct, test, and refine their own models using domain-specific, block-based programming. The design was grounded in three high-level conjectures, that science learning can be supported through: representing and distinguishing students’ existing ideas with simple, shared blocks; refining models through comparison with real-world data, and linking scientific ideas to computational practices through modeling. We employed conjecture mapping to synthesize across multiple studies to trace the relationship between these conjectures, design features, mediating processes, and learning outcomes. Implementation in middle school classrooms revealed four key mediating processes: expressing diverse ideas, exploring scientific concepts through code, validating models with data, and engaging in whole-class discourse. We observed measurable gains in students’ scientific, computational, and modeling skills. This paper contributes practical insights into how educational technologies can be intentionally designed to align with learners’ intuitive reasoning and classroom needs, offering a model for integrating data-driven modeling into science curricula.
Nurturing a sense of wonder and curiosity can prepare children to succeed in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers as they learn how to explore and navigate the world through scientific investigation. Parents can support children’s learning process through praise, which can boost intrinsic motivation, perseverance, and encourage adaptive performance attributions characterized by a willingness to take on new challenges and increased confidence. However, there are many nuances regarding praise and its effects on behaviors, such as exploration, which might not always amount to positive outcomes. This study investigated the link between various types of parental praise and successful coding and computational learning strategies during a collaborative coding activity between children and their parents in a STEM context. We examine the relationship between parental praise and exploration by assessing the quantity and quality of parents’ praise statements in relation to the pairs’ number of unique coding attempts and child's self-reported confidence in their coding abilities. We also examine potential gender differences for praise given by parents and received by children. Our results suggest that process-oriented praise that focuses on effort and an understanding of concepts is associated with exploratory behaviors during a coding activity. However, there is no significant link between any type of praise and a child’s coding confidence. Additionally, gender and context have a role in shaping parental feedback, as girls tend to receive more praise than boys do, and activities with more completed objectives lead to more praise. These findings can inform innovative educational approaches and digital tools that encourage deeper engagement during children’s learning.
Objectives Social media is an integral and ever-present part of young people’s everyday lives. This includes young people with visible differences, who may use social media for additional purposes, such as to find information about their condition. However, very little research focuses on the unique experiences of this group when using social media. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the social media experiences of young people with visible differences. Methods This study used an inductive qualitative approach. Twelve participants aged 13-17 years (9 girls, 3 boys, Mage= 15.58) with a range of visible differences were recruited online via a group of charitable organisations. Participant-driven, semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews were used to generate the data, which were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results Three themes were generated: 1) Scroll at your own risk; 2) A whole new world of visible difference; and 3) Making social media work for me. Conclusions Young people with visible differences appear aware of the potential harms of using social media and employ various strategies to keep themselves safe and protect their wellbeing. Despite its potential harms, social media can also benefit young people with visible differences as it allows them to connect with others with similar experiences who they may not otherwise meet offline. This can have a positive impact on young people’s wellbeing and subsequently motivate them to use social media to support others with visible differences.
The character strength of gratitude has many positive effects and is increasingly promoted in educational interventions. Delivering gratitude interventions through digital technology can increase scalability and enhance children’s motivation to understand and express gratitude. Additionally, co-design with children from the target population has the potential to create more usable and educationally effective solutions that fit better with children’s everyday experiences. We conducted 2 studies, one based on 3 prototyping sessions with 10 children and the other based on 3 usability sessions with a separate sample of 8 children, in the design of a mobile game to teach Colombian preadolescent children about gratitude, based on an existing non-digital intervention. Study 1 focused on the development of design principles to guide the subsequent development of the app, while Study 2 aimed to show that the game could be both fun and educational. Children found the game usable and fun, according to both the System Usability Scale and qualitative interview and focus group questions. They saw potential for learning about gratitude, but also suggested changes that were incorporated into the final design, including simplifying the conceptual language used and introducing new visual design and interaction elements. We also incorporated a real-world activity outside the game to reinforce children’s learning of diverse gratitude expressions. The design principles we developed were shown to be relevant to children’s experiences across both studies. The benefits of transdisciplinary, child-centered work to integrate economically deprived children’s feedback in designing culturally relevant character education tools are discussed.
There is a general agreement in the Child-Computer Interaction community that participation is a core value in our research practices. However, the way we report the sessions tends to limit the focus on design decisions and flatten the session complexity, resulting in a superficial description that hinders the full understanding of the process and makes it difficult for other researchers to learn from it. In this paper, we tackle the need for more reflexive and rigorous reporting of participatory sessions while acknowledging their creative and crafting dimensions. We conducted a scoping review of 101 methodological and theoretical papers in Child-Computer Interaction to understand which contextual elements influence the session and should then be considered an essential part of it. We identified four categories: the Experience Nebula, the Social Nebula, the Structural Nebula, and the Identity Nebula. Driven by the ethnographic concept of thick description, we then organized them into rings of the Stargazer Map, a scaffold that displays the contextual elements that shape a session. The Stargazer Map aims to assist researchers in producing a rich report in order to support and share their knowledge claims. Instead of providing a static checklist, it fosters high-level situated reflection, helps keep sight of the direction taken, and contributes to making participatory design research practices more transparent and generative.
As young people rapidly integrate AI technologies into their everyday lives, they face numerous ethical dilemmas and decisions about their use. To support them in addressing these dilemmas, research is needed to understand how youth currently use and think about AI in their lives. We engaged 29 teens (ages 14–17) in five co-design sessions focused on their everyday uses of AI tools and platforms. Our results show that teens use AI to engage in a variety of tasks ranging from central to supporting in relation to their focal activity. We further demonstrate how teens exert different levels of cognitive effort while using AI tools. Through our analysis, we identified three types of concerns that teens expressed about their AI use: instrumental, personal, and existential concerns. We use these insights to offer guidance for designing AI tools and educational curricula to support teens’ responsible and ethical AI use.
Computational Empowerment (CE) aims to equip children with agency to navigate a digitized world, yet its assessment in classrooms remains underexplored in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research. This study addresses this gap by investigating how in-service teachers formatively assess and facilitate CE within formal K–12 education. Drawing on interviews with teachers, we examine their practices, needs, and perspectives. Findings show that teachers embed formative assessment in CE activities through observation of project progress and engagement, and facilitate learning through dialogue, such as inquiry and feedback. However, they face systemic constraints and need more supportive assessment tools. This study contributes to CCI in three ways: First, we provide a descriptive view of current teachers’ CE formative assessment practices. Second, we integrate them to propose normative assessment strategies for CE. Finally, we offer directions for future CCI research to design ecologies for CE formative assessment. Ultimately, this study underscores the pivotal role of formative assessment as a lever for realizing CE’s transformative potential in education.
‘Relationality’ is increasingly used in human-computer interaction as a lens to support knowledge building and design practice by shifting the attention to inclusion, collaboration, and interconnection as key qualities while studying humans and technology. This scoping literature review analysing 61 studies seeks to understand how academic literature in fields relevant to child-computer interaction has employed the relational lens during the last decade to explore how children engage with the world in formal and non-formal learning contexts. Following PRISMA guidelines, we identify the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of adopting a relational perspective in research and practice involving children. We outline main relational practices used in the studies and propose strategies for child–computer interaction researchers to integrate and expand the use of the relational lens in their work particularly within learning contexts, while also extending to broader domains connected to child–computer interaction.
Deceptive design patterns—i.e., user interface tactics that serve to manipulate users into making decisions that benefit a company—are endemic to playful digital experiences. Children have been identified as particularly vulnerable to these tactics, owing to their ongoing cognitive development and nascent critical reasoning. In this paper, we employ a media content analysis—utilising Gray et al. (2024) hierarchical and universal ontology—to assess the prevalence and presentation of deceptive design patterns in playful apps aimed at young children (aged 5–8 years). Our results show that free apps rely more heavily on deceptive design patterns than paid apps, and that the high-level categorisation of patterns employed most frequently include Interface Interference, Sneaking, and Forced Action. Exploring how these patterns are deployed (including how they manifest at the meso- and low-levels), we identify the ramifications for child users and their caregivers. We propose potential solutions that can be enacted by caregivers, suggest improvements that can be made to digital storefronts, and submit suggested foci for regulatory bodies. Building on existing research, this work contributes a vital step towards characterising the climate of deceptive design patterns in playful apps explicitly targeting young children.
Safety features in social VR vary across platforms in terms of what protections are offered and how they are enacted, with little publicised evidence validating such differences. With the increase in children using social VR, the need to develop safety features designed around their needs, rather than targeting adult users, becomes crucial. Accordingly, we conducted in-depth interviews (n=16) with experts in child online safety and psychology to explore child-targeted safety features. We examined expert perceptions of ten existing real-time social VR safety features, drawn from two popular social VR platforms. We then asked experts to propose recommendations for and to reflect on safeguarding children from harassment in social VR, giving specific consideration to (a) individual versus group harassment, as the impact can be amplified and the social interaction dynamics differ; (b) the perspectives of harasser versus victim. We contribute seven expert-derived guidelines for the design of safety features to safeguard children in social VR.
Research indicates that up to 97% of autistic people experience sensory sensitivities. Many autistic young people are avid gamers; however, little is known about whether or how sensory sensitivities manifest and impact them in the virtual world. This paper aims to explore how playing Minecraft influences an 11-year-old autistic gamer's sensory sensitivities in the physical world. This research was designed as a case study leaning on a grounded theory approach to capture the depth of the participant's experience in the physical and virtual worlds. Data were gathered from documented parent-gamer dyadic dialogue (secondary data), two coding cycles and a modified thematic analysis were used. Eight categories were identified, from which three themes emerged: 1) Expressing sensory sensitivities in both physical and virtual worlds, 2) Regulating sensory sensitivities through avatar embodiment in Minecraft, and 3) Technical and social skill development as regulatory mechanism in Minecraft. The findings suggest that self-regulation strategies could be shaped through playing Minecraft and potentially applied in the physical world. While earlier studies reported that video games negatively impact autistic gamers, our study gives breadth to the argument that video games may also have a positive and regulatory effect on autistic gamers.
This paper explores two ten-year-olds’ collaboration at a circuitry-making workshop within a public library makerspace. Drawing upon the conceptual framework of figured worlds [1], the study examines the construction of circuits by the two children, focusing on their identity and positioning. Analysis of their verbal and physical interactions during the workshop reveals two key findings. Firstly, the children exhibited effective collaboration and coordinated making, facilitating problem-solving. Secondly, their positioning and identity work within the workshop differed despite successfully constructing working circuits. These findings highlight the significance of learners’ awareness and appreciation of their developmental trajectories, extending beyond the performance of identity and its external recognition. The recognition of one’s expertise and the awareness of factors that contribute to it are instrumental to learners’ internalization of performed identities. By delving into these complexities, the paper offers valuable insights into children’s participation within makerspaces and the range of identities negotiated in those settings. Ultimately, this article advocates for a holistic understanding of the implications of inclusive and equitable technology-rich learning environments to address evolving patterns of participation.
Energy systems increasingly require active citizen participation, yet youth voices remain marginalized in energy technology design. This paper reports on participatory design studies with 21 teenagers (ages 12–14) from economically disadvantaged areas of London, exploring how youth conceptualize community energy sharing. Using participatory design, we conducted workshops across two secondary schools involving scenario-based design, persona development, and low-fidelity prototyping around solar energy sharing scenarios. Students designed eco-feedback applications featuring priority systems based on social circumstances, negotiation tools, and community profiles emphasizing social relationships over individual optimization. Our findings reveal teenagers’ energy citizenship perspectives that challenge adult-centric approaches by prioritizing care, social justice, and interdependence over efficiency metrics. Students demonstrated sophisticated understanding of energy justice, designing transparent processes for democratic energy allocation and viewing technology as mediating community communication rather than algorithmic authority. This work contributes methodological approaches for youth participatory design in sustainability contexts and demonstrates how engaging young people reveals alternative visions for just energy transitions.
