Child Computer Interaction Research Research Articles

“I could become a white hat hacker” or “At least I am creative”: Children's technology protagonist identities and their evolution during a critical design and making project

Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research stresses the importance of nurturing children's designer and maker identities; children should be growing up as future technology protagonists, who are driving technology development and critically reflecting on it. While the importance of designer and maker skills has been emphasized in the CCI literature, studies focusing on children's identity development are scarcer. This paper starts to fill this research gap. We develop a theoretical framework on children's technology protagonist identity based on multidisciplinary literature base. Based on pre- and post-interview dataset from a long-term critical design and making project with several school-classes, we identify divergent aspects of protagonist identity among children: they position themselves variably as technology users, designers, makers, critics and activists. Different designer and maker identity trajectories are also identified. The paper contributes to CCI research on identity and CCI discourse on technology protagonists and children's technology education.

Onboarding new talent to Child–Computer Interaction research: Teaching a tasting menu of CCI as an elective research subject

We present a case study in which we seek to investigate what motivates interaction design students to take a small elective course in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) and what we can offer as a ‘tasting menu’, a small sample of emerging research specialties, to awaken their interest for CCI. The study clarifies what motivated students to take the elective course and what their learning expectations were before the start of the course. We then prototyped and piloted a research-based ‘tasting menu’ type of course and conducted a formative and summative evaluation with the students. The contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations for onboarding new talent to the research field by teaching CCI in a modular fashion to interaction design students, based on students’ and teachers’ experiences.

A research agenda for computational empowerment for emerging technology education

The article proposes a research agenda for computational empowerment for emerging technologies in the field of child–computer interaction (CCI) – in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). This research agenda includes three levels of operation for future studies: (1) participatory practice, capable of engaging teachers and students in co-developing and designing approaches for teaching and learning emerging technologies, (2) educational principles for integrating technological and societal aspects of emerging technologies, and (3) digital tools for engaging students in construction of and critical reflection on emerging technologies. The research agenda was developed from longitudinal studies of the respective emerging technologies in Danish K–12 education, participatory design research with in-service teachers, development of novel tools and technologies, and literature studies of current CCI research. The paper addresses current gaps in the CCI literature and contributes a coherent approach and guiding questions for future CCI research on computational empowerment for emerging technology in education.

Computational empowerment of children: Design research on empowering and impactful designs by children

Prioritizing children’s empowerment in and through design has been on the agenda of child–computer interaction (CCI) research for a long time. Recently, the notion of the computational empowerment of children has received attention. However, there are still open issues in our understanding and advocacy of it. A related development is the recent interest in the longer-term impacts of our work. Fast and furious participation of children in design sessions is considered inadequate. We should advocate for longer-term trajectories and possibilities for children to make changes that will influence our world. However, the literature is limited in addressing longer-term impacts. This study taps into these two research gaps and showcases how we have addressed the computational empowerment of children in a project tackling bullying at school through critical design and making. In this paper, we examine in detail the children’s designs and their trajectories from the viewpoint of empowerment and impact: whether and how these children’s designs show potential for the empowerment of those bullied and whether and how their designs have had an impact in the realm of digital technology development. Our study has interesting conceptual and methodological implications for CCI research and practice on the computational empowerment of children and on our design research practice.

DORIT: An analytical model for computational empowerment in K-9 education

This paper presents and explores an analytical, research-based model for computational empowerment in K-9 education. The model, entitled DORIT (“Do your Own Research In Technology”), contributes to Child–Computer Interaction research by providing scaffolding for teachers to create teaching activities emphasising a critical inquiry approach to computational empowerment. We present the DORIT model, its research base and report from a study where 18 in-service teachers took part in codesigning and testing lesson plans based on the model for grades 1, 6, 7 and 9. The lesson plans serve as proof-of-concept demonstrations of how the DORIT model can scaffold teaching activities. We further analyse how the teachers used the model in practice, and report from post-interviews with the teachers regarding their experiences with the model. We conclude the paper by discussing the potentials and challenges of the DORIT model to support computational empowerment in future CCI research.

Characterizing the research-practice gap in children’s interactive storytelling systems

Storytelling support has been and continues to be a recurring theme in child–computer interaction research, especially as it pertains to education. This work has spilled over into practice, and, in the last few decades, a large number of storytelling systems for children have been developed—both as research prototypes and commercial applications. However, through a systematic analysis of 75 research-based storytelling systems and 39 commercial systems, we find that there remains a problematic gap between research and practice with respect to products in interactive storytelling and child–computer interaction, echoing the well-documented research-practice gap in the general HCI field. We characterize the nature of this gap, highlighting design themes promoted by research-based systems that are not as prevalent in commercial systems, such as tangibility and narrative scaffolds, and vice-versa. Understanding the main areas of discrepancy between research and practice can help focus efforts to close the research-practice gap in storytelling systems for children.

Computational empowerment in practice: Scaffolding teenagers’ learning about emerging technologies and their ethical and societal impact

Whereas computational empowerment is well established in child–computer interaction research, less effort has been made to integrate this approach in practice. Building on four existing principles in child–computer interaction, namely Closeness, Embodied Learning, Design Process and Decoding, we explore how computational empowerment can be scaffolded in practice. This study was part of an interdisciplinary research project exploring emerging technologies in education (CEED). We involved 9 teachers and 26 students (14–15 y) in Denmark in teaching about machine learning and augmented reality. In the article we develop a framework for applying computational empowerment in formal educational contexts. Based on the study, we found that computational empowerment builds on distinct layers which are these four principles. Specifically, merging the principles Closeness and Embodied Learning can increase student engagement and motivation in the activities; in addition, Decoding and Design Process are key principles for promoting student awareness of the societal impacts of emerging technologies. Based on qualitative data from this intervention, we discuss the opportunities and challenges for child–computer interaction in moving toward computational empowerment in practice.

Critical agenda driving child–computer interaction research—Taking a stock of the past and envisioning the future

There is a revitalized interest in power and politics around design and technology in the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) field. Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research community has also shown arousing interest towards the topic. However, despite this emerging interest, the CCI research community has remained quite silent about the potential of a critical agenda for CCI. Few studies have explicitly addressed critical research or critical design. This study introduces the notion of a critical agenda for CCI research and identifies CCI studies that are linked with the critical agenda, revealing that there are CCI studies showing emerging interests and seeds for addressing the critical agenda. Overall, this study explores the state-of-the-art critical research tradition in CCI and explicates the potential of this tradition for making the world a better place through design and technology in collaboration with children.

Research in Child–Computer Interaction: Provocations and envisioning future directions

In the 21st century the academic field of Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) arose alongside burgeoning interactive technology and digital media industries that targeted children. We believe that the field of CCIU is at an important point in its development, analogous to when a child becomes a teen. Over the last few years we have each had many informal conversations with other CCI researchers in which we discuss issues such as, what is our responsibility as researchers beyond academe? What values underlie our conceptions of a ”good” childhood and the role of interactive technology in it? And, how do we ensure that our field continues to grow and evolve in ways that are consistent with our responsibilities and values? To address these and other complex questions that have been drawing our attention we came together to reflect, discuss and create a position paper for our community, in which we outline some of the issues we see facing our community at this time. To inform our deliberations with opinions beyond our own we conducted an informal consultation with 25 members of the CCI community. Our responders spanned junior to senior researchers, represented diverse geographies and included industry practitioners. These diverse responses provided further content for our reflections, and helped us see perspectives beyond our own. The result of this informal process is this speculative paper in which we propose a series of seven provocations that aim to disrupt some of the normative assumptions held in our field. Our goal in doing this is to open up dialogue in our community about these issues and promote consideration of the alternative visions we present for where we might focus our attention and efforts. We see our contribution not as truth or a definitive statement of a vision for the field, but rather as our opinion about some of the complex issues we face and that we think should be considered through dialogue as we move into the next phase of our development as an academic and scholarly community. We believe that it is urgent and critical for our field that we take up these questions, explore diverse perspectives, and critically work towards decisions and actions that will define our identity and the value of our contributions as we move forward into the next 20 years of research in CCI.

Child–Computer Interaction: From a systematic review towards an integrated understanding of interaction design methods for children

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.

Going beyond short-term, ‘reduced’ PD: Towards an encompassing typology for children’s participation in infrastructuring processes

Although child participation has been on the Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research agenda for many years, there is a lacuna in research on the roles children can play in long-term, sustained Participatory Design (PD) processes. This article explores the characteristics of an infrastructuring approach to PD that revolves around long-term and on-going socio-technical processes as opposed to the more typical short-term PD projects concerned with delivering a finished design product. Based on empirical data collected in three case studies involving both short-and long-term PD processes with children between 6 and 16 years old, we investigated different roles children can play in long-term, sustained PD. The contribution of this study is a comprehensive typology of children’s roles that goes beyond children’s participation in traditional, ‘staged’ PD. This typology offers the necessary vocabulary and analytical toolbox to account for key notions of infrastructuring, including ‘match-making’, ‘publics’, ‘agonism’, ‘attachments’, ‘shared issues’ and ‘capacity-building’.

In Pursuit of Inclusive and Diverse Digital Futures: Exploring the Potential of Design Fiction in Education of Children

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants - children in schools and Child Computer Interaction researchers. We conducted one long-term project with two schools in Finland and two one-day workshops with an international set of participants. Through an analysis of participants’ experiences and outcomes in the project and workshops, we build a case for diversity and inclusionthrough design fiction in the context of children’s education. In addition, through an analysis of the process we as researchers took for developing the project and workshops, we showcase the support of diversity and inclusion in design fiction.

Sensing technologies and child–computer interaction: Opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations

This study presents the outcomes of a systematic literature review of empirical evidence on the capabilities of sensing technologies for child–computer interaction (CCI). This paper provides an overview of what and how sensing technologies have been used to explain, understand, and predict children’s experiences with interactive devices and technologies and in what contexts. A search resulted in 44 papers that were included in the analysis. The results of the review depict the capabilities of sensing technologies for gauging children’s performance, engagement, and experiences (while interacting with technology) and the ongoing advances and implications that emerge from the employment of sensors to capture and improve child behavior. In particular, we identified the four main objectives (i.e., engagement of children, recognition/prediction of special needs/behavior, explaining/understanding the behavior/attitude, and learning performance/experiences) that the CCI research has been focusing on with sensor data. We also summarize the implications derived from the reviewed articles and frame them within four thematic areas. Finally, this review stresses that future research should consider developing a framework that would enable sensor data capacities to be aligned with the ethical, social, and generalizability guidelines. These sensor capacities could also be utilized to advance theory and practice. Our findings set a baseline for supporting the adoption and democratization of sensor data within future interactive technology research and development for children.

Designing for Children’s Reflections in Collaborative Interaction Mediated by Technology: A Systematic Literature Review

Reflection is an integral part of collaborative interaction. However, we know little about how to design for reflection in collaborative activities mediated by technologies. This systematic literature review focuses on children’s reflections within the collaborative practices in child-computer interaction research and investigates (1) the link between reflection and collaborative activities, (2) the types of collaborative technologies to scaffold reflection, and (3) the methodological approaches to analyze reflection. We searched the ACM Digital Library, Scopus and ProQuest which resulted in 141 papers that make the link between terms ‘reflection’ and ‘collaboration’ explicit, where only 13 of these involve children as the primary actors of reflection. The results show that this topic is increasingly gaining attention, however, the link between reflection and collaborative interaction remains underdeveloped. The contribution of this study is to provide a theoretical and methodological basis to understand, analyze and support children’s reflections within a collaborative activity through technology.

Manifesto for children’s genuine participation in digital technology design and making

We articulate in this paper what participation at its best entails in the context of digital technology design with children, forming a theoretical framework for genuine participation of children in digital technology design and making. We integrate in the framework a set of conditions for the meaningful and effective participation of children and the nexus analytic concepts of historical body, interaction order and discourses in place, and complement that with the lenses of empowerment, values and value. In addition to these theoretical lenses, we rely on the insights gained during our empirical work with children for more than a decade. We contribute to research on Child Computer Interaction (CCI) by explaining what ‘participation at its best’ entails in practice and how it can be studied in research. Thus, CCI researchers and practitioners advocating participation, empowerment and inclusion of children can benefit from this framework when planning, analysing and evaluating their projects with children.

Designing Technologies with and for Youth: Traps of Privacy by Design

Media and communication scholars studying young people’s privacy often involve them in research in order to better understand their interactions with digital technologies. Yet there is a lack of research on how, when, and why it makes sense to involve young people in the design phase of new technologies and how data protection safeguards can be taken proactively by design. By engaging with the body of literature at the intersection of media and communication studies, participatory design, and child–computer interaction research, this article discusses how youth-centred design efforts risk falling into three traps of privacy by design, relating to: 1) the different degrees of decision power within and between child-centred design guidelines and participatory design with young people; 2) the involvement of young people in design as citizens versus consumers; and 3) the conditions under which their participation in design is empowerment rather than mere decoration. The contribution of this article is a critical, sociotechnical reflection on the challenges and opportunities of involving young people in privacy by design decision-making. The article concludes by outlining an agenda for participatory design within an encompassing empowerment and digital citizenship framework that invites young people to reflect on who they want to be in a data-driven society.

Movement forward: The continued growth of Child–Computer Interaction research

Abstract In this inaugural editorial as the new and the past editors-in-chief of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (IJCCI), we take stock of the journal’s progress in its first 8 years of existence, and we describe our views and plans to support the journal maintain its positive trajectory as the premier journal in the multidisciplinary area of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) and Interaction Design and Children, and a respected and leading journal in the fields of human–computer interaction, interaction design (IDC) and the learning sciences. Here we take the opportunity to lay out a vision for the upcoming years as well as to reflect and engage in a constructive and critical dialogue about the future of CCI as a field of research and the IJCCI.

Child-Computer Interaction in times of a pandemic.

The increasing presence of interactive technologies in children’s lives poses critical ethical questions for researchers and designers. Discourse specific to these intersecting topics is nascent, spread across communities and largely developed retrospectively. In a series of workshops and panels at the annual ACM Interaction Design for Children (ACM IDC) conference, a small group from the community has aimed to provide a central space and continuity for this discourse. The most recent of these spaces was the ACM IDC 2020 workshop entitled, “Emergent, Situated and Prospective Ethics for Child–Computer Interaction Research” that brought together a small group of researchers interested in sharing and discussing ethical issues arising when researching, designing, and deploying technologies for children [1]. When we, as the two main organizers of the workshop, wrote the workshop proposal we were particularly interested in how the ethical challenges in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) were changing in the face of a rapidly changing world. At that time, it was completely unknown to us how different the world would be when we conducted the workshop. When the participants eventually met online for this workshop in late June 2020, a global pandemic had changed public life as we knew it and social justice issues, as manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement, were causing widespread unrest. Layered on these immediate challenges was the looming climate crisis that poses one of the most existential threats to humans yet. When we ran the workshop, we decided to focus our discussions on sharing thoughts and experiences of what these monumental shifts might mean for our community. The question, which we put onto the virtual floor was: How is the ethics of your research changing in the face of the Covid-19 Pandemic and recent social justice issues, as manifested in the Black Live Matters movement? What followed was a rich and thoughtful discussion. Every participant was affected by the pandemic in different ways, both personally and professionally. In the 45 min session we had reserved for this part of the workshop, we were all not only connected via video link, but also collaboratively worked on a shared virtual whiteboard at the same time. In a very productive mix of show and tell, we collected sticky notes, online resources, quotes and other bits of information; all the while making connections and categorizations. Later, we, as the two main organizers, discussed our observations from the workshop, and then reviewed the data and our own notes to informally look for themes related to our original question. We wrote up the themes individually, and worked collaboratively to refine, clarify, and contextualize them. From this exercise, four main themes emerged, which all included perceived challenges as well as the participants’ recommendations for how these concerns might be addressed moving forward. The following briefly summarizes these themes.

Advancements on Child–Computer Interaction research: Contributions from IDC 2018

Abstract Designing technology for and with children is the main focus of the Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) community. The questions posed are; how can we better understand children’s needs? and how can we design for and with them? The annual Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, as the premier event in CCI, offers a channel for presenting and discussing state of the art research endeavors and exhibiting the most recent developments in CCI. Drawing from the highest peer-reviewed papers from IDC’18, this special issue of the International Journal of Child–Computer Interaction presents advancements from five selected contributions. This editorial introduction further draws attention to the great potential and need for furthering CCI research to understand and improve the design, development, and use, of interactive technologies for children.

Mapping child–computer interaction research through co-word analysis

Abstract 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.