Search

This paper presents the ongoing development of the clip:bit, a clipboard-style micro:bit V2 extension for biodiversity monitoring in schools and community groups. The clip:bit is one component in a wider system to enable schools to engage in longitudinal studies of biodiversity in school grounds and local areas, monitoring the impact of landscape management and children's ecological activities, such as the introduction wildflower meadows or planting hedgerows. The clip:bit was designed in response to needs identified during fieldwork in schools. We describe how the design addresses these needs and point to the way the clip:bit fits into a wider plan for data management and data visualisation. We also discuss the application of an existing micro:bit peripheral, the Kitronik Game Controller, for biodiversity monitoring and compare their use for different cases.

Providing a good understanding to children and educators on the Internet of Things (IoT) means to make them aware about where the data goes, how it is stored, and what it is stored on. In this perspective many commercial IoT systems have been shown to be unsuitable for this purpose especially when used in an educational context. They do not create user centric data collection opportunities; many of their IoT sensors that send data offsite to an online cloud create gaps in knowledge; the sensors themselves are not transparent: it's not clear what data they are collecting and how, and they are not easily compatible with school networks. Classroom Cloudlet addresses this issue. This demonstration presents an end-to-end IoT like system that includes a mobile, tangible, and transparent classroom cloudlet. Classroom Cloudlet aims to allow data from multiple devices to be easily shared, collated and analysed without using the Internet, but while still educating students about IoT and cloud concepts. The classroom cloudlet aims to be a physical representation of a cloud in an IoT system; visualise the movement of data around the system; provide a web front-end for students to view and create custom visualisations of their data. Classroom Cloudlet aims to gives the educator and the children full control and ownership of their data.

Failures are not reported enough in the literature as the pressure of publishing successful stories has moved us away from considering that even unsuccessful stories can be equally relevant to increase knowledge in research. Analyzing failures can be a great learning opportunity for the community of researchers. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a research that investigated the challenges experienced when designing and running studies with children. The study began with a literature review which led to an inquiry focused on exploring failures within the Child-Computer Interaction community by interviewing 14 researchers. Interviews were analyzed in the vein of the thematic analysis approach. We deliver three themes (unpredictability, technology targeted at adults, children willing to achieve the goal), three action points (the context, the technology, and the activity) and a paradigm shift from "failures need to be hidden"to "failure is a learning opportunity".

Children's fears and hopes regarding technology play a crucial role in influencing its development, impact, and social acceptance. Although studies investigate children's perceptions of social robots, there is a need to better understand how hopes and fears influence children's views of the future. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a study in which we explored 60 children's (aged 8-14) perceptions of social robots using ten fictional scenarios. From data analysis, we elicited four major themes that become the pillars of a model that represent children's perception of social robots (agency, comprehension, socioemotional features, and physicality). The model shows the complex and often paradoxical nature of children's acceptance (hope) and rejection (fear) of social robots in their lives. Our outcome provides the foundations of a new responsible approach in analyzing and designing social robots for children using hopes and fear as a lens.

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ĝ€?FOR VERIFICATION>create' scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

This short paper introduces Energy in Schools, an interactive platform designed to improve energy efficiency in UK schools through a combination of environmental measurement and behavioural change. Uniquely, Energy in Schools is designed to empower all the stakeholders within a school, including children, teachers and leadership groups to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions. The paper reports on the motivation and design of the platform, a discussion on how interactive materials and educational activities were developed to raise awareness and understanding of energy and the climate emergency, how children led activities were used to instrument and analyses energy use via child friendly Internet of Things technologies. Finally, an analysis of its success in encouraging behavioural change through the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a live deployment across 20 schools is presented. Overall, it was observed that encouraging multiple stakeholders to work together interactively can decrease energy consumption in the majority of schools by over 5%.

Children often perceive abstract concepts such as chemistry as difficult, and teachers struggle to convey content knowledge in these subjects. In this pictorial, we address the need to promote the interest for chemistry in children by developing a multi-layered Augmented Reality serious game that uses storytelling, character design and game mechanics to connect and engage young audiences with chemistry: the Periodic Fable an Augmented Journey. Our contribution relies on the design and development of the system to convey content knowledge about the Periodic Table while fostering the children's interest and challenging their possible daunting perception of the domain. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study using a mixed-method approach engaging 21 young participants from a public school to assess the learning gains and the role of storytelling through levels of narrative transportation. The results show positive perception and learning outcome of chemistry, narrative transportation showcasing an opportunity for a unique form to approach chemistry using an edutainment format.

Gender stereotypes can harm children well being, impact on their career path an also led to discrimination behaviour. Our research aims at challenging children's gender stereotypes and exploring how a Digital StoryTelling tool can be be designed to detect these at early age. Based on the literature review we have developed a prototype named Genderalize that aims at stimulating children's reflection on their stereotypes. The tool was developed in a co-design process involving nine experts in children-computer interaction. The final version was tested by nine the adults stakeholders (e.g. guardians, parents, teachers). The outcomes provide thoughtful considerations on how Genderalize helped the detection of gender stereotypes by the means of a contextualised narrative and the reflective exercises. Results' impact was limited due to the small sample, but the outcomes were very useful to move on to the next step of the project and inspire new developments.

The increasing presence of robotics, automated systems, and AI in everyday life is carrying important ethical and social implications for both those who design and develop them as well as for the users. Addressing these complex issues requires active collaboration between multiple stakeholders, including children. Nonetheless, even if emergent technologies are becoming increasingly present in education, most technology-mediated educational projects for children tend to focus on the development of technical skills, leaving little room for critical reflection. This tendency runs the risk of missing opportunities to truly empower children as critical users, (future) responsible designers and skilled stakeholders in the dialogue around ethical concerns on technology. Starting from this perspective, the workshop aims at tracing research lines and opening questions around strategies, methods, tools, and perspectives to support children in developing an ethical and critical sensitivity in the use, design, and development of emergent technologies.

This work explores how comic-based digital storytelling can support primary school children in reflecting on situations involving conflict in the classroom. In particular, we focus on investigating three specific aspects: (1) the potential of digital story composition conducted collaboratively or individually, (2) the children’s perception on the use of digital storytelling for reflecting on conflicts that might arise in class and, (3) the teachers’ experience of introducing a digital tool for collabo- rative storytelling and comics composition in an educational context. In this paper, we explored these aspects by develop- ing a case study. A class of 12 children and 2 teachers explore the use of a digital tool, named Communics, aimed at creat- ing digital narratives individually and collaboratively. The results show that digital narratives created from collabora- tive storytelling are longer, more structured, and richer with meaning compared to stories from individual work. More- over, it emerged that children prefer to work collaboratively, even if it meant compromising, going slower and waiting for their turn. Finally, teachers appreciated the collaborative use of Communics, and in particular, the turn-based feature as children can practice the narrative re-elaboration with a peer while waiting for their turn.

The increasing presence of robotics, automated systems, and AI in everyday life is carrying important ethical and social implications for both those who design and develop them as well as for the users. Addressing these complex issues requires active collaboration between multiple stakeholders, including children. Nonetheless, even if emergent technologies are becoming increasingly present in education, most technology-mediated educational projects for children tend to focus on the development of technical skills, leaving little room for critical reflection. This tendency runs the risk of missing opportunities to truly empower children as critical users, (future) responsible designers and skilled stakeholders in the dialogue around ethical concerns on technology. Starting from this perspective, the workshop aims at tracing research lines and opening questions around strategies, methods, tools, and perspectives to support children in developing an ethical and critical sensitivity in the use, design, and development of emergent technologies.

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research question: how can gender stereotypes be detected in the stories produced by children with Digital StoryTelling? We addressed this issue by analyzing 23 multimedia stories created by 83 children, aged 11-12 years. The main contribution of our work is an evaluation methodology to detect gender stereotypes. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

In the paper we describe an exploration into the design of an authoring tool to support the creation of multimedia stories. We explicitly targeted children with no reading or writing skills and their educators. Children in this age group often enjoy reading and creating stories together with adults and in so doing develop important pre-literacy skills. Literature suggests that when children play an active role in these activities, with a high level of engagement and interaction, there is a significant increase in their vocabulary acquisition and an improvement in their communication skills. Thus, we investigated these issues by conducting an explorative study in a pre-school class with fifteen children and three teachers. Here, we describe the emerging challenges and provide design directions for an authoring system to support the co-creation of stories for pre-literate children. © 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).