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This Australian study examines whether and how technologies such as Artificially Intelligent (AI) toys in a home-based setting might socially and emotionally support children with diverse needs through play. Building on the concept of ‘emotional capital', and employing a design-based research approach, parents during the COVID-19 lockdown periods in 2020 intentionally used robotic toys to engage their children with additional diverse needs in home-based play experiences. The data from both parents’ and children’s ( n = 5) Zoom interviews, digital observations and children’s drawings demonstrated how children creatively conversed with their AI robots in innovative and empathy-based dialogues that generated happy feelings and a sense of ‘imaginary’ togetherness with their robot during the coding experiences. This study contributes to research by exploring the use of AI robotic toys together with physical and artificial environments and offers a case to build children’s emotional capital in enabling children’s social-emotional literacies.

The aim of this article is to investigate ways that young children interact with touchscreen devices during museum visits and during the process of making a digital story in their kindergarten classrooms related to these visits. Drawing on children’s communicative embodied museum experiences and the notion of wayfaring and lines of movement, I discuss that digital stories become children’s visual lines of movement in time and place, and that through the process of making a digital story, children become digital wayfarers. Data include pictures, videos, children’s drawings and their digital story. In particular, I argue that this way back to the museum can be seen as children’s visual and digital ways of connecting with, interacting with and inhabiting the museum. This article gives insights on children as creative meaning makers, by looking at children’s perspectives and by exploring children’s visual lines of movement through their digital story.