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Online collaborative learning and working are important for everyone including children. However, children still face a lot of difficulties communicating and working together while online, which keeps them from engaging in long-term project-based teamwork. We aim to investigate online long-term collaborative learning opportunities to address this gap. We design COLP, an online, 16-week, project-based learning program, as an educational intervention based on multiple learning theories for primary school students. We conducted this program with 67 primary school students ages 8-13, across more than five provinces of China. We found that this program could engage more than one-third of children in teamwork after long-term study. Furthermore, we interview children and their parents to help us understand the communication channel, benefits, and challenges of this program. Interestingly, we discovered that parents play multiple roles in their children's collaborative learning, particularly modeling and guiding the children's collaborative skills. Given the lack of programs designed for children's long-term online collaboration, this study may inspire intervention design in computer-supported collaborative learning communities., Comment: 42 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction

With the increasing integration of large lauguage models (LLMs) in education, there is growing interest in using AI agents to support student learning in creative tasks. This study presents an interactive Mentor Agent system named Mentigo, which is designed to assist middle school students in the creative problem solving (CPS) process. We created a comprehensive dataset of real classroom interactions between students and mentors, which include the structured CPS task management, diverse guidance techniques, personalized feedback mechanisms. Based on this dataset, we create agentic workflow for the Mentigo system. The system's effectiveness was evaluated through a comparative experiment with 12 students and reviewed by five expert teachers. The Mentigo system demonstrated significant improvements in student engagement and creative outcomes. The findings provide design implications for leveraging LLMs to support CPS and offer insights into the application of AI mentor agents in educational contexts., Comment: Comments: 19 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to CHI 2025