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In this paper, we investigate and map out how learning is assessed in Child–computer interaction (CCI) research. We have conducted a semi-systematic literature review in the CCI community's leading venues: the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference and the International Journal of Child–Computer Interaction (IJCCI). This eventually led to 30 publications that use the word stem ‘learn*’ in title, abstract and keywords being included in the corpus. Based on our analysis of these publications, the results demonstrate that there are three main strands of research approaches, namely quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods, some of which are design-based. The case studies taking a qualitative approach dominate the field whereas the mixed-methods approach remains low in number. Furthermore, the findings showed that basic characteristics of research design and approaches to the assessment of learning are rarely defined, and that assessment of learning is scarcely operationalized. This affects the methodological rigor and possibility of understanding causality of technology interaction in children's learning. It was also found that only a limited number of works include assessment of learning regarding transfer of learning and controlled groups. The main findings from this review describe the current state-of-the art and address the gaps in CCI research in presenting evidence for learning in children as a desired impact. We conclude with suggestions for future avenues for the assessment of learning in CCI.

Participatory Design (PD) with children allows children to contribute to, or have control over, the development of technologies for themselves and others like them. However, the children who are most likely to be involved in PD are often the most privileged. This special issue seeks to push the boundaries of PD with children. The papers published in this special issue examine designing with children from many countries; designing with minority groups; digital distributed PD; the right length for PD projects; and new approaches to PD.

Although there is an increased focus on the ethical responsibilities of designers when designing children’s technologies, there are few academic examples of what it entails to teach this to design students. We have therefore set out to explore the most common ethical dilemmas experienced by design students in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) when interacting with children in the field. This case study article reports on an analysis of the situated ethical experiences from 45 international master students in interaction design during their projects to design children’s technologies. The main research question for this paper is what common ethical dilemmas students in CCI experience when involving children in their design process. The dilemmas we present stem from the written home exams of the students in our course and have been clustered under three temporally relevant themes: Selection of participants, Informed Consent, and Working with children. These situational ethical dilemmas can be used by teachers in the field to complement the formal ethical guidelines provided to students and have a discussion on how to deal with them in their own practice.

Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) is a steadily growing field that focuses on children as a prominent and emergent user group. For more than twenty years, the Interaction Design for Children (IDC) community has developed, extended, and advanced research and design methods for children’s involvement in designing and evaluating interactive technologies. However, as the CCI field evolves, the need arises for an integrated understanding of interaction design methods currently applied. To that end, we analyzed 272 full papers across a selection of journals and conference venues from 2005 to 2020. Our review contributes to the literature on this topic by (1) examining a holistic child population, including developmentally diverse children and children from 0 to 18 years old, (2) illustrating the interplay of children’s and adults’ roles across different methods, and (3) identifying patterns of triangulation in the methods applied while taking recent ethical debates about children’s involvement in design into account. While we found that most studies were conducted in natural settings, we observed a preference for evaluating interactive artifacts at a single point in time. Method triangulation was applied in two-thirds of the papers, with a preference for qualitative methods. Researchers used triangulation predominantly with respect to mainstream methods that were not specifically developed for child participants, such as user observation combined with semi-structured interviews or activity logging. However, the CCI field employs a wide variety of creative design methods which engage children more actively in the design process by having them take on roles such as informant and design partner. In turn, we see that more passive children’s roles, e.g., user or tester, are more often linked to an expert mindset by the adult. Adults take on a wider spectrum of roles in the design process when addressing specific developmental groups, such as children with autism spectrum disorder. We conclude with a critical discussion about the constraints involved in conducting CCI research and discuss implications that can inform future methodological advances in the field and underlying challenges.

Technologies that aim to support preschool children’s learning are emerging rapidly in the industry. However, the developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account in the early stages of technology design. This paper addresses this gap in the child–computer interaction field by exploring how children between the ages of 2 and 4 years old interact with spatial manipulatives that facilitate their early spatial learning. To this end, we developed Embedded Figures in Stories (EFiS) method to elicit age specific knowledge about preschoolers’ spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation) and inform child-tangible interaction (CTI) design. To develop EFiS method, we modified intervention techniques for early spatial learning found in cognitive developmental studies and incorporated these into design methods used in CTI. In this paper, we first present an argument for why CTI design with and for preschoolers is important for early spatial learning. Second, we describe our method and how we applied it in a case study. Then, we discuss the potential opportunities and limitations of using the EFiS method, along with design guidelines for future use of the method. This study mainly contributes to design methods to extract age specific knowledge about very young children’s spatial thinking skills, which lay a basis for further STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) achievements.

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 ACM. Zoos have been consistently popular with young visitors, helping educate children in animal conservation. However, zoos' typical strategies employ interactive signs and videos, which children largely ignore. In pursuit of new engagement methods, children were invited to design for animals via ZooDesign, a gamified imaginative design approach centred on an educational card and role-playing game, ZooDesign assists children in envisaging how animals can use technologies, by exploring their welfare needs and humans' involvement. Many children designed with the animals' well-being in mind. Analysis of their creations and role-play interviews revealed that the method constitutes a good process but not all designs were appropriate for use with animals. Furthermore, few designs included the children themselves; most emphasised zookeeper and researcher roles instead. Building on child-computer interaction methods for zoo-based education contexts, the research raises key questions involved in educating children about animals.

Despite the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community's rapid growth in the past two decades, there has traditionally been less focus on developing a curriculum to teach CCI to students. This entails a risk for a gap between the accumulation of knowledge and the transfer of this knowledge to new generations of researchers and designers. Building on previous workshops organized at IDC 2011 and 2014, the goal of this workshop is to gauge the current state of teaching CCI to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. More specifically, the workshop aims to re-evaluate previous lessons learned, stimulate reflection on best practices, facilitate an exchange of knowledge, and provide a forum for international collaboration. The envisioned outcome is a blueprint for a CCI curriculum that can be taught anywhere in the world.

This paper employs hierarchical clustering, strategic diagrams, and network analysis to construct an intellectual map of the Child–Computer Interaction research field (CCI) and to visualize the thematic landscape of this field using co-word analysis. This approach assumes that an article’s keywords constitute an adequate description of its content and reflect the topics that the article covers. It also assumes that the co-occurrence of two or more keywords within the same article indicates a linkage between those topics. This study quantifies the thematic landscape of the CCI field and elaborates on emerging topics as these are manifested in publications in the two primary venues of the CCI field, namely the proceedings of the annual IDC conference and the International Journal of CCI. Overall, a total of 1059 articles, and their respective 2445 unique, author-assigned keywords, are included in our analyses — all papers have been published between 2003 and 2018. The results indicate that the community has focused (i.e., high frequency keywords) in areas including Participatory Design, Tangibles, Design, Education, Coding, and Making. These areas also demonstrate a high degree of ”coreness” (i.e., connection with different topics) and ”constraint” (i.e., connection with otherwise isolated topics). The analysis also highlights well-structured yet peripheral topics, as well as topics that are either marginally interesting, or have the potential to become of major importance to the entire research network in the near future. Limitations of the approach and future work plans conclude the paper.

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. When holding parents responsible for the consequences of young children's online interactions, we overlook design opportunities that support a meaningful role for parents in these interactions. This paper considers the perspectives on online risks and opportunities, as studied in parental mediation studies, and on the capabilities of young children to make sense of online environments, as proposed by post-modern notions of the child. The paper presents a case study of the functionalities of an online entertainment platform that define the role of parents in young children's online play and communication. This paper reports on a three-phased study, inspired by Value-Sensitive Design, that presents the values of the design team and parents with at least one 4 to 10-year-old. The main contribution is the formulation of design guidelines that serve as a starting point for the CCI community to research and design novel functionalities that enable parents to play a meaningful role in young children's interactions with digital platforms. ispartof: International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction vol:18 pages:22-26 status: published

This paper presents the Collaborative Design Thinking (CoDeT) co-design approach, its theoretical framework, and its application in a case study with 49 children aged 9 to 10 in two schools. CoDeT aims to scaffold children's collaboration and design thinking in co-design settings characterised by a high child-to-adult ratio (ca. 1 adult for 15 to 20 children), such as schools, museums and maker spaces. In these settings, children have to work relatively independent from adults who become guides on the side. This can be challenging due to children's limited understanding of the design process and their lack of skills to collaborate productively towards a shared design goal. CoDeT addresses these challenges by integrating principles of Social Interdependence Theory (SIT) and Design Thinking (DT), which together form the theoretical backbone of the approach. CoDeT was first applied in a case study and yielded promising results in terms of children's collaboration and design thinking skills, yet possible improvements were found. The insights of this case study informed the revised version of CoDeT presented at the end of this article, in a what-why-how structure, allowing researchers and practitioners to apply the co-design approach in a wide variety of contexts characterised by high child-to-adult ratios. ispartof: International Journal Of Human-Computer Studies vol:130 issue:130 pages:179-195 status: Published online

International audience; In this demonstration we showcase a new spatial augmented reality device (interactive projection) with three applications: education and experimentation of color models, map exploration for visually impaired people and scientific vulgarization of machine learning. The first exhibition is an interactive exploration about the nature of light. Visitors can experiment with additive subtractive color models. We engage them with questions, and they have to reply using cards to find out answers. This exhibit is suitable for children. The second exhibition is about map exploration and creation for Visually Impaired Persons (VIP). VIP generally use tactile maps with braille to learn about an unknown environment. However, these maps are not accessible to the 80% of VIP who don't read braille. Our prototype augments raised-line maps with audio output. The third exhibition is destined to be used for scientific outreach. It enables the creation of artificial neural networks (ANN) using tangible interfaces. Neurons are represented by laser-cut diamond shaped tokens, and the data to learn is printed on cards. The ANN learns to differentiate shapes, and the whole learning process is made visible and interactive. These three applications demonstrate the capabilities of our hardware and software development kit in different scenarios. At ReVo, each demonstration will have its own setup and interactive space.

International audience; The cerebral activity is an intangible physiological process difficult to apprehend, especially for children. With the aim of providing a new type of educational support, we studied the pedagogical potential of an interactive tangible interface (Teegi) designed to be used in educational context. This interface aims at enabling children to discover the relation between the brain activity and the human body functions. We propose in this study a methodology to evaluate its pedagogical potential in real context of use, considering the specificities of the children. This study, carried out with 29 pupils, highlights the strengths of this system, both in terms of its usability and its impact on learning. Moreover, the results provided by this methodology revealed possible improvements for a greater pedagogical effectiveness. This type of interactive interface, as well as the evaluation method proposed, paves the way for the pedagogical use of new interactive and tangible devices at school.; L’activité cérébrale est un processus physiologique intangible qui peut être difficile à appréhender, notamment pour des enfants. Pour répondre aux besoins en supports pédagogiques et favoriser les apprentissages liés à ce type de concepts, nous étudions le potentiel d’une interface tangible interactive dédiée à la visualisation d’activités cérébrales (Teegi) en contexte éducatif. Nous proposons une méthodologie d’évaluation du potentiel pédagogique en contexte réel d’utilisation par des enfants. Cette étude réalisée avec 29 enfants, met en évidence les forces de ce système, tant au niveau de son utilisabilité que de ses impacts sur les apprentissages visés. Les résultats obtenus mettent en lumière des axes d’améliorations possibles pour une plus grande efficacité pédagogique. Ce type d’interface, ainsi que la méthode d’évaluation que nous proposons, ouvrent la voie de l’utilisation pédagogique de nouveaux dispositifs interactifs et tangibles en milieu scolaire.

International audience; The cerebral activity is an intangible physiological process difficult to apprehend, especially for children. With the aim of providing a new type of educational support, we studied the pedagogical potential of an interactive tangible interface (Teegi) designed to be used in educational context. This interface aims at enabling children to discover the relation between the brain activity and the human body functions. We propose in this study a methodology to evaluate its pedagogical potential in real context of use, considering the specificities of the children. This study, carried out with 29 pupils, highlights the strengths of this system, both in terms of its usability and its impact on learning. Moreover, the results provided by this methodology revealed possible improvements for a greater pedagogical effectiveness. This type of interactive interface, as well as the evaluation method proposed, paves the way for the pedagogical use of new interactive and tangible devices at school.; L’activité cérébrale est un processus physiologique intangible qui peut être difficile à appréhender, notamment pour des enfants. Pour répondre aux besoins en supports pédagogiques et favoriser les apprentissages liés à ce type de concepts, nous étudions le potentiel d’une interface tangible interactive dédiée à la visualisation d’activités cérébrales (Teegi) en contexte éducatif. Nous proposons une méthodologie d’évaluation du potentiel pédagogique en contexte réel d’utilisation par des enfants. Cette étude réalisée avec 29 enfants, met en évidence les forces de ce système, tant au niveau de son utilisabilité que de ses impacts sur les apprentissages visés. Les résultats obtenus mettent en lumière des axes d’améliorations possibles pour une plus grande efficacité pédagogique. Ce type d’interface, ainsi que la méthode d’évaluation que nous proposons, ouvrent la voie de l’utilisation pédagogique de nouveaux dispositifs interactifs et tangibles en milieu scolaire.