Children today are growing up amid accelerating environmental change, climate disruption, and interconnected social and ecological crises, whilst digital technologies increasingly shape how they learn, communicate, and participate in the world around them. Together, these transformations raise urgent questions about how digital technologies can be designed to prepare children for uncertain and rapidly changing futures. This editorial introduces the special issue “A call for social imaginaries at a time of climate crisis: The role of technology in children’s environmental sustainability” and examines the contributions of six papers that bring together perspectives from Child-Computer Interaction, environmental education, sustainability studies, and design research. Drawing on four cross-cutting themes—positioning technology, affect and emotional connections, empowerment and agency, and local, global, and imagined futures—we argue that the collection signals an important development in how researchers conceptualise the relationship between children, technology, and environmental sustainability. Across the papers, digital technologies are generally positioned as mediators of participation, reflection, and collective meaning-making rather than as straightforward solutions to environmental challenges. The contributions also emphasise the importance of emotional connection, care, and imagination in environmental learning, extending beyond approaches centred primarily on knowledge acquisition or behaviour change. Children are positioned as leaders, co-designers, interpreters, and future-makers whose participation is central to sustainability efforts. At the same time, the issue foregrounds critical questions concerning techno-solutionism, digital inequality, justice, and the assumptions that underpin environmental and technological interventions. Together, the papers advance a research agenda that prioritises relationality, participation, and collective imagination in supporting children to engage with and help shape more sustainable futures.
This editorial commentary presents a reflective and value-driven guide for Participatory Design (PD) in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI). Rather than introducing new methods or revisiting existing guidelines, it offers readers a reflective guide for understanding what meaningful participation with children entails and how it can be responsibly enacted in research practice. The paper synthesizes decades of PD work in CCI and articulates four core commitments (democracy, empowerment, mutual learning, and recognition of children’s skillfulness) and situates them within a four-wave account of the field’s development. The key contribution lies in reframing PD as an ongoing ethical and methodological stance rather than a set of techniques. By providing reflective guidance across the stages of planning, enacting, evaluating, and sustaining participatory work, the commentary equips researchers to examine their own PD practices critically, avoid tokenistic participation, and better justify why and how children are involved. Overall, the editorial aims to provide conceptual clarity and methodological reflexivity in PD-based CCI research and supports more accountable and impactful participatory practices.
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.
