Understanding and supporting children’s emotions has become increasingly recognized as a critical factor in effective learning, with growing research exploring methods for capturing emotional states in educational contexts. This literature review examines the role of technology in enabling children to self-report their emotions during educational activities. Drawing on 23 studies, we analyze various tools for capturing children’s emotions to identify the state of the art in the types of tools used and their impacts. Our findings reveal that the prevalence of both paper-pencil-based and technology-based self-reporting tools features graphical user interfaces (GUIs), while tangible user interfaces (TUIs) remain underrepresented in educational settings despite their potential for less intrusive and real-time reporting. Accordingly, we discuss future research directions and advocate for integrating subjective self-report data with objective physiological data from sensors, such as wristbands or AI-driven facial recognition systems, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of children’s emotional states.

Design Thinking (DT) is a promising approach for addressing complex real-world problems. Its application in education enables learners to build new knowledge through open-ended, creative processes. However, given DT’s strong reliance on hands-on activities and collaborative teamwork, challenges arise when extending DT activities into digital interactions through tools and platforms in K-12 settings. To address the limited availability of such resources, we present the design of a fully digital dt-toolkit that supports all DT phases and is tailored to the wicked problem of cybersecurity and online awareness for young learners.We conducted a two-day workshop with 62 sixth-grade learners. Following the activity, group interviews with 30 participants examined how the dt-toolkit’s interaction scaffolded DT practice, collaboration, and cybersecurity knowledge acquisition. The results indicate improvements in learners’ understanding of online safety and risks contextual to their daily life. Learners reported engagement and creativity supported by digital affordances, and that dt-toolkit phase-based interactions facilitated coordination and collaboration within groups. However, learners also identified challenges related to uneven pacing across groups and mixed perceptions of the AI hints embedded as an additional form of guidance.From our findings, a fully digital DT experience shows preliminary promise in supporting learners’ engagement across DT phases and in cultivating their awareness of cybersecurity concepts such as phishing and online scams. The implications for the interaction design of digital learning toolkits elaborate on the importance of coherent narratives, authentic scenarios, and carefully calibrated AI support.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing a growing role in K-12 education. However, curricula often lack structure and proper assessment when paired with collaborative approaches like Design Thinking (DT). Here, behavioral and affective dynamics are overlooked, even though they are indicators of both performance and quality of the learning experience, warranting a more in-depth exploration through Multi-Modal Learning Analytics. Therefore, we engaged 63 students, divided into 29 groups (aged 11 to 15) in a DT workshop on AI, analyzing their performance across each stage of their experience, including their behavioral and affective (i.e., emotional) states, using data collected from physiological sensors, audio, and video recordings. Our results show that certain conditions (e.g., joint visual attention, boredom, and high stress) consistently predicted positive or negative performance across all stages of the workshop, while affective states such as confusion, frustration, high engagement, and low stress fluctuate with implications on the learning experience.

Design thinking (DT) is an approach used to address complex societal issues by engaging learners in hands-on problem-solving. Current educational guidelines seek to leverage the synergies between DT, digital literacy, and computational skills to enhance students' understanding and application in real-world matters, such as cyber-security and online awareness. However, tackling such learning experiences requires a shift in teaching approaches and the endorsement of educational technologies to foster digital agency. This empowers students to become proactive, informed participants in the digital future, starting from the classroom. To explore the feasibility of this approach from the students' perspectives, our study carried out a DT project with a block-based programming platform to emphasize the importance of cyber-security. Our study involved 113 students aged 10 to 12 across three K-12 schools. Of these, 52 agreed to participate in data collection via a semi-structured interview at the end of the project to share their experiences. We gained insights into students' perceptions regarding collaboration, technology interaction, and knowledge gained through thematic analysis of the interview data, considering both challenges and potential. For instance, we shed light on roadblocks arising from mismatched tool affordances and students' familiarity, as well as topic differentiation in elaboration based on participants' skills. At the same time, DT potential, when paired with digital tools, emerged to ease into everyday wicked problems in an engaging way and foster solution-oriented thinking.

This paper presents insights from five case studies with 173 students aged 11–14 years old across three countries in Europe, exploring the integration of design thinking (DT) and emerging digital technologies in K-12 education. The study aimed to understand the impact of DT and digital technologies on the development of students’ 21st-century skills and capture the challenges students and teachers face. The focus is to give evidence-based recommendations for teaching using the DT approach. Despite the positive student reports on developing communication, collaboration and programming skills, other skills related to research and reflection, and understanding of DT were rather less developed. The main challenges teachers faced were related to time constraints, difficulties in using the technologies, lack of clear instructions, and limited understanding of the DT process. Seven practical recommendations on how to effectively teach and learn DT with digital technologies are presented. These are accompanied by the Exten. (D.T.)2 Digital Design Thinking Model, an innovative framework designed to guide the use of DT with specific digital technologies across K-12 education.

Technological advancements are transforming teaching methods while offering wider windows into students’ learning journeys. Multi-modal Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) are tools that facilitate smart classroom orchestration by aggregating and analyzing students’ responses through sensors, such as facial expressions and heart rate, for real-time insights into student engagement and emotional states. In this study, we developed an LAD for open-ended activities in K-12 settings, where orchestration is non-linear and poses challenges for standardized evaluation methods. We engaged end users (e.g., educational researchers) in the process from the early design stages and investigated the feasibility of the LAD when used in the wild. The results show how affective data support greater awareness of students’ experiences, improving teachers’ orchestration through better decision-making and agency. Roadblocks were also identified regarding data interpretability, students’ privacy, and additional teacher workload, which can limit adoption and should be carefully addressed in future implementations. Further research should investigate students’ responses more closely and further develop strategies for the responsible, explainable, and unbiased use of student affective data in real classrooms.

Environmental education plays a critical role in addressing current environmental challenges. However, it is challenging to effectively engage and motivate students to learn more and have a critical view about it. Therefore to enhance students learning experience in environmental education, this paper presents the development of a gamified app named coralQuest that aims to boost motivation, enjoyment and improve learning outcomes. To evaluate the interaction and user experience of coralQuest, data was collected from log data, questionnaires, and interviews, from 41 children aged 12–14 years old. The results indicate the positive effects of various game elements, like the leaderboard, while highlight that other, like the pedagogical agent, needs more attention for their appropriate inclusion. Further research is necessary on the development of gamified learning environments that effectively engage learners and cultivate positive attitudes in environmental education while catering different demands.

Design thinking (DT) and computational activities foster children’s knowledge capital for 21st-century literacies. The analysis of these activities often overlooks affective and behavioural states despite their significance in providing insights into children’s learning processes. Typically, these states and their changes are self-reported, lacking real-time capturing. Moreover, inquiries via Multi-Modal Data (MMD) for more comprehensive views are underrepresented in the current literature. We, therefore, conducted a DT activity focusing on coding engaging 33 children (aged 10 to 12) and analysed measurements including learning gain (from knowledge tests) and behavioural and affective states (from physiological sensors, video and voice recordings). Our results show that engagement and confusion exhibit positive correlations between MMD measurements and learning gain, while stress, frustration and anger stand out as detrimental for it. By mapping transitions in states experienced by the children, we unravelled negative learning scenarios that should be limited, along with positive indicators of increased performance.

Environmental education (EE) plays a vital role in engaging young people in exploring environmental issues and developing their sense of responsibility to the environment. Although gamification appears to be a promising way to motivate and engage K-12 students, it is unclear how it should be implemented in EE and whether it holds promising results similar to other contexts, such as science and engineering education. This paper reports a systematic literature review analysing the 28 papers published in the last five years. The results show how gamification has been employed to support EE and in what contexts. More specifically, the findings of this review contribute to our knowledge in the following three aspects: (1) EE strategies for implementing gamified interventions, (2) gamification strategies and elements utilised in EE, and (3) reported outcomes of gamified EE intervention. Finally, the paper discusses the implications for future related research on developing gamified interventions for EE.

Inquiry-based science learning is an educational strategy to enable students to actively engage in science learning concepts through inquiry activities such as experiments and observations. Gamification demonstrates a promising potential to engage children in learning contexts. In this regard, this paper presents Experiverse as an exemplar along with its associated six key design considerations to illustrate how to develop an application based on the concept of gamification and inquiry-based science learning for children. This paper reports on our experience evaluating Experiverse with 25 children (aged 9-13) in an informal setting based on data collected from log data, surveys and interviews to explore the feasibility of engaging children in science learning outside their classroom. Results indicated that children's motivation (MO) significantly correlates with their enjoyment (PE) and perceived learning outcome (LOA) from using Experiverse. While children's perceived learning outcome is significantly positively correlated with the number of view visits on Experiverse (EVV), the number of experiment view visits (EVV) is also significantly positively correlated with children's perceived easiness of the app. Finally, this paper discusses the key findings of this study and points out the design implications for future research, like combining in-app experience and hands-on experimentation in real-life situations.

Nowadays, learning activities have become more interactive and collaborative than ever before. However, it remains unclear what makes the group perform differently in such a learning context. With the empowerment of multimodal data (MMD), we conducted a field study involving 12 groups of children who collaborated during two-day-long classroom activities. This paper reports on a quantitative analysis and temporal explanation concerning the relation between children's performance and their group-level MMD measurements during a collaborative coding session in a design thinking activity. We computed each group's performance based on the created artefacts and compared the groups with better performance than the others. The results demonstrate that high-performing groups show more joint engagement, joint visual attention, and joint emotional intensity of delight, while low-performing groups show significantly more joint emotional intensity of frustration. In addition, the evolution over the four temporal phases showed different patterns between high and low-performing groups. Finally, this paper discusses design and theoretical implications for educators, researchers and practitioners.

The use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and 3D printing are amongst the EU targeted actions for supporting the digital transformation of education. Yet, despite these technologies being accessible to education stakeholders, there is a lack of concrete pedagogy and teachers’ professional development for their meaningful integration into the current educational context. Extending Design Thinking with Emerging Digital Technologies – Exten (D.T.)2 - is a European funded project aiming to use emerging technologies to enhance the pedagogical value, sustainable digitization, and potential for wide deployment of Design Thinking (DT). DT is a promising pedagogical innovation, based on interdisciplinary co-creation, that can lead to sustainable educational innovation and development of students’ 21st century skills. In this paper, we describe the main components of the proposed educational transformation as developed during the first year of Exten (D.T.)2 including the theoretical foundations of the approach, the co-creation processes for meaningful engagement of teachers with educational innovation. Moreover, we present the educational technology tools (design, extensions, architecture) that are used in the project and the evaluation approach for capturing impact on improving students’ skills and competencies.

There are numerous strategies for reducing the stress and anxiety associated with pain that children experience before and after surgery. There is a potential communication barrier between hospital staff and the child which may result in inadequate pain management. Social robots may reduce the gap between the support that personnel can provide and what the children's emotional needs are. This study qualitatively evaluates the interactions between children and their parents who interact with the social robot MiRo-E. In the overall interaction, the robot would act like a pet and show different behaviours based on the estimated pain level of the children. However, in the current study, only the quality of the robot interaction behaviours was tested with healthy children and no pain was measured. During this study, two usability tests were done. Each usability test evaluated a different robot interaction. In both tests, children and their parents evaluated the designed interactions. Results indicate that children initially have different responses to the robot. They can either be held back from immediately interacting or they are not afraid of the robot at all and start touching it and interacting immediately. Although the intended behaviours could be more elaborate and personalized, both children and their parents appeared to like the different emotions shown by the robot and how it responded to their touch. The parents also offered some ideas to enhance the interaction between a child and a robot in a medical context, such as by including more sounds, making some behaviours more distinct, and allowing kids to customize the robot's look.

Science learning at schools often lacks relevance and connection to real life; therefore, children find it challenging to apply their knowledge and may gradually lose motivation and interest in science. Gamification demonstrates a promising potential to engage children in science learning. However, little work has explored how to develop such gamification applications for them. This paper presents Experiverse, an experiment-based gamification application we developed for children's science learning in informal settings. To evaluate the interaction and experience with Experiverse, we collected data from 25 children (aged 9-13) from multiple sources, including log data, surveys and interviews. Results indicated that children's motivation significantly correlates with their enjoyment and perceived learning outcome from using Experiverse. In addition, the results revealed that children's perceived learning outcome is significantly positively correlated with the number of view visits on Experiverse. Finally, we discuss the implications for future related research on gamification application development for children.

The increasing demand for medical services in hospitals has sparked interest in exploring alternative methods to support children with functional articulation disorders. Online speech games have emerged as a promising avenue to motivate children to engage in speech therapy. This study investigates the impact of gamification strategies on children's motivation within the context of speech rehabilitation games. Four distinct game prototypes were developed, with a specific emphasis on stimulating children's motivation to speak. Two sets of experiments involving 48 participants were conducted to assess the influence of (1) time-limitation and (2) interactive imitation objects on children's motivation. The results revealed that time limitation significantly increased motivation, while the effect of imitation objects on motivation was not statistically significant. These findings offer valuable insights into designing effective speech games for children. By leveraging gamification strategies in online speech games, we can address the motivation challenges faced by children with functional articulation disorders and potentially enhance the efficiency of speech therapy interventions.

There is a growing interest in implementing robotics applications for children in healthcare to provide companionship, comfort, education, and therapy. Parental expectations regarding robotics for young children play a critical role in influencing its development and acceptance. However, parental expectations are widely overlooked in HRI. Therefore, a better understanding of what parents of young children expect the robot to do in health-related interactions with robots is needed. To achieve this, we adopted the Technology-Specific Expectation Scale (TSES) [2] and added three more dimensions (i.e., assistive role, social-emotional, and playful distraction) to gauge users' expectations of robots in healthcare, resulting in TSES-R. This paper reports the development and reliability analysis of TSES-R. Furthermore, this paper presents the preliminary results collected from using the TSES-R with a sample of 31 families, which showcases how these outcomes could be helpful for future related studies.

There is growing interest in psychological interventions using socially assistive robots to mitigate distress and pain in the pediatric population. This work seeks to address the deficit in understanding of what features and functionality young children and their parents desire to help with pain management by using co-design, a common approach to exploring participants' imaginations and gathering design requirements. To close this gap, we carried out a co-design workshop involving seven families (with children aged between 4-6 and their parents) to understand their expectations and design preferences for a robot designed for pain management in children. Data were collected from surveys, video and audio recordings, interviews, and field notes. We present the robot prototypes constructed during the workshops and derive several preferences of the children (e.g., zoomorphic shape, distractors and emotional expressions as behaviors). Additionally, we report methodological insights regarding the involvement of young children and their parents in the co-design process. Based on the findings of this co-design study, we discuss personalization as a possible design concept for future child-robot interaction development.

Research into the role of emotions in Design-Based Learning (DBL) is growing, but little attention has been paid to the regulation of students' emotional resources to support their DBL experiences. Here we investigate the social sharing of emotions in the DBL context and explore how such behavior affects students' DBL experiences that might help emotional regulation and team cooperation. We report two intervention studies conducted in 2020 during the Covid-19 epidemic, which explored different ways of sharing task-related emotions with peers and teachers, and evaluated the impact upon a total of 28 students' (aged 13-16) DBL experiences. The first study concerns the implementation of a group chat channel in Microsoft Teams ® for sharing emotions. The second employed FireFlies (i.e., an interactive lighting device) and a set of task cards that served as a peripheral display for sharing task-related emotions. Data were collected through questionnaires, observations, and interviews. Based on this study's findings, we make recommendations for designing tools to support students in sharing emotions and suggesting how instructors could address students' emotions.