Child Computer Interaction Research Articles

Beyond school: The role of technology in K-12 students' lives and informal learning

The lives of children and teenagers are saturated with digital environments with multi-purpose uses and satisfy various needs. This study aims to expose the significance they attribute to their activities, to find out how these activities meet their needs, and to discuss their relevance to the field of child-computer interaction. The study is based on a qualitative approach, raising the voices of 29 K-12 students. The findings' analysis combined a bottom-up thematic analysis with a top-down analysis based on the Uses and Gratifications Theory. The bottom-up thematic analysis revealed three themes: the centrality of social networks, gaming culture, and new skills across digital platforms. The top-down analysis reveals a new range of present-day uses and gratifications: security needs lead to discretion and different usage modes. The research revealed that using digital environments entails informal learning, ample visual language use, acquisition of knowledge, and identity development.

Developing educational serious games as a proposal for university training in the area of Child Computer Interaction

Training in the area of CCI has become a current topic of debate. It is necessary to address the specificities related to this target audience in terms of ethical aspects, evaluation techniques and instruments and the appropriate approach to content, forms of interaction, among others. This work focuses on a project-based learning experience that is being developed with students in the area of computer science, who work on the development of educational serious games aimed at children. Different axes related to CCI training and educational game design are approached in a phase-based process and an analysis of cognitive residues that are addressed is also included. The project developed in 2023, related to healthy eating, is presented as an example of the experiences carried out with students. The results indicate that this type of proposals are attractive and motivating for the students involved, who participate in real projects with stakeholders and children.

“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.

Co-designing cybersecurity-related stories with children: Perceptions on cybersecurity risks and parental involvement

Co-designing and co-creating technology have recently received much attention in the child-computer interaction (CCI) community. However, there has yet to be much work to explore the co-designing aspect in the field of children’s cybersecurity awareness and parental involvement. With this study, we present the results of a co-design activity with ten children between 9 and 12 years to explore how children think about different cybersecurity issues and parents’ roles in those cybersecurity-related situations. Our findings show that children expect various adult roles to provide support to ensure their safety online and especially expect their parents to take a supportive role in cybersecurity experiences by informing them about the risks, offering suggestions on mitigating or protective measures, and helping them take protective measures or actions against any entity posing the risks. Our study contributes to understanding children’s perceptions of cybersecurity and parental involvement through storytelling.

Teaching CCI in Computer Science and Computer Science Education

This paper elaborates on a series of Child–Computer Interaction courses conducted at three universities in Germany. It emphasizes the integration of hands-on activities and a significant project development component, allowing students to practically apply and enhance their CCI knowledge. The article details the course structure, students’ engagement, and the evolution of content, underlining the importance of experiential learning in CCI education. Additionally, it offers reflections on the outcomes and lessons learned, serving as a resource for university lecturers looking to incorporate similar courses in their curriculum.

UX Design for Deaf Children: How is it Done Now? Should it Change?

The process by which user experiences (UX) for children are created is uncertain, especially for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children. This paper seeks to (I) describe the origins of UX and child–computer interaction and to describe what is being taught to designers today; (II) use the example of digital assessment to extract insights from practitioners about UX design for DHH children; and (III) describe opportunities for amending today's UX design curricula to foster more equitably designed products for children. Interviewing 13 practitioners revealed the following findings. (1) Allowing non-designer participants to self-identify their profession makes them more likely to discuss design concepts. (2) The challenge of working with children is more about legal/risk assessment than any gaps in design education. (3) Practitioners who design products for children follow similar processes to designers who design for adults; age-specific language is the main difference child and adult UX.

Teaching child-computer interaction: Critical reflections on a project-based interaction design course

As a response to a recent call for developing teaching materials and sharing examples of good teaching practice in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI), this paper describes previous experiences from incorporating an existing CCI curriculum into an Interaction Design course, that is mandatory for third year Bachelor students enrolled in Communication Design program. This article is an attempt to reflect on the four-year experience constructively and critically in teaching and progressively developing an existing CCI course. The paper describes key elements to teaching how to carry out a theory-oriented and project-based design course formulated around the challenge of interaction design with and for children. As the paper reflects on previous experiences, the contribution of this paper is including formal procedural research ethics into student project proposals as part of core principles and giving students the possibility to manage a group work on several iterations for the same project throughout the semester. I discuss some of the reflections on the teaching experience for interaction design and children have posed to me as a CCI researcher and university teacher and outline a set of lessons learned that I think would shed a light for taking ethical approval for student project works in future CCI teaching practices.

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.

Children age group detection based on human–computer interaction and time series analysis

This article proposes a novel children–computer interaction (CCI) approach for the task of age group detection. This approach focuses on the automatic analysis of the time series generated from the interaction of the children with mobile devices. In particular, we extract a set of 25 time series related to spatial, pressure, and kinematic information of the children interaction while colouring a tree through a pen stylus tablet, a specific test from the large-scale public ChildCIdb database. A complete analysis of the proposed approach is carried out using different time series selection techniques to choose the most discriminative ones for the age group detection task: (i) a statistical analysis and (ii) an automatic algorithm called sequential forward search (SFS). In addition, different classification algorithms such as dynamic time warping barycenter averaging (DBA) and hidden Markov models (HMM) are studied. Accuracy results over 85% are achieved, outperforming previous approaches in the literature and in more challenging age group conditions. Finally, the approach presented in this study can benefit many children-related applications, for example, towards an age-appropriate environment with the technology.

Unmasking the Power of Play Through TUI Designs

Research on the potential benefits of technology for autistic children is an emergent field in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially within the Child-Computer Interaction Community. At the same time, there are concerns about what these interventions and technologies are for and who benefits. We present a research and design approach for Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) for minimally verbal to nonverbal autistic children following a neurodiversity narrative through three field studies developed and evaluated with three groups of children within a semi-structured scholastic environment between 2018 and 2021 in the UK. We discuss our insights for research and TUI designs in the context of social play for nonverbal autistic children and critically reflect on the methods and approaches we used. We do this to disrupt the normalisation agenda that subtly permeates the field of HCI and to direct designers’ attention toward supporting autistic ways of being in the world.

An Investigation of the Relationship Between Parents’ Socioeconomic Standards and their Children’s Online Safety; Perspective: Bangladesh

"The field of child-computer interaction has garnered significant interest from researchers worldwide. Nevertheless, the discourse around the protection of children’s digital safe, that includes privacy and security remains significantly underrepresented in both Bangladesh and the broader global south. In situations where a significant portion of senior and adult persons lack awareness regarding optimal strategies for effectively utilizing digital gadgets and tools, it is difficult to anticipate a higher level of proficiency among younger individuals. Privacy generally encompasses the capacity of individuals to exercise control over, get access to, and govern their personal data. In contrast, the security system serves to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access, data leakage, or cyber intrusions, therefore safeguarding the data from potential compromise. Previous studies have indicated that the responsibility for safeguarding the digital privacy and security of children lies with both parents and children themselves. Regrettably, a dearth of scholarly investigations exists within the domain, hindering the ability to systematically monitor and analyze the potential relationship between parental socioeconomic status and the privacy and safety of their offspring. This research aims to discover the correlation. This study employed semi-structured interviews with a sample of 48 parents and 42 children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, including high income, middle income, and low-income groups. The collected data were subjected to statistical analysis. The findings of this study indicate that children from high income families are more susceptible to online safety issues compared to their counterparts from low-income households. This vulnerability is attributed to factors such as the widespread availability of internet access and personal digital devices, greater purchasing power on online platforms, and a lack of parental monitoring. This study presents a limited number of recommendations for parents and children across various socioeconomic backgrounds in order to enhance the state of internet safety for children."

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.

Spontaneous Facial Behavior Analysis Using Deep Transformer-based Framework for Child–computer Interaction

A fascinating challenge in robotics-human interaction is imitating the emotion recognition capability of humans to robots with the aim to make human-robotics interaction natural, genuine and intuitive. To achieve the natural interaction in affective robots, human-machine interfaces, and autonomous vehicles, understanding our attitudes and opinions is very important, and it provides a practical and feasible path to realize the connection between machine and human. Multimodal interface that includes voice along with facial expression can manifest a large range of nuanced emotions compared to purely textual interfaces and provide a great value to improve the intelligence level of effective communication. Interfaces that fail to manifest or ignore user emotions may significantly impact the performance and risk being perceived as cold, socially inept, untrustworthy, and incompetent. To equip a child well for life, we need to help our children identify their feelings, manage them well, and express their needs in healthy, respectful, and direct ways. Early identification of emotional deficits can help to prevent low social functioning in children. In this work, we analyzed the child’s spontaneous behavior using multimodal facial expression and voice signal presenting multimodal transformer-based last feature fusion for facial behavior analysis in children to extract contextualized representations from RGB video sequence and Hematoxylin and eosin video sequence and then using these representations followed by pairwise concatenations of contextualized representations using cross-feature fusion technique to predict users emotions. To validate the performance of the proposed framework, we have performed experiments with the different pairwise concatenations of contextualized representations that showed significantly better performance than state-of-the-art method. Besides, we perform t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding visualization to visualize the discriminative feature in lower dimension space and probability density estimation to visualize the prediction capability of our proposed model.

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.

Changing the dynamics of preschool children's social play with technology: evaluation of technology-based supports for tools of the mind style play

ABSTRACT In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children's socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children's face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children's sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children's socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival's support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival's components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.

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.

Emerging Technologies in K–12 Education: A Future HCI Research Agenda

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Kid Mode on or not? A Critical Analysis from Perspective of Child-Computer Interaction

Children now use leisure software more and more frequently through electronic devices such as mobile phones, computers, and tablets. Therefore, it is particularly important to solve the problems that arise when children interact with computers. Most of the leisure software are also commonly used by adults. Although most of these software have child protection mechanisms (such as the kid mode), due to some shortcomings in their functions and interactions, the needs of parents and children cannot be fully met. How to solve these defects is an important issue. In this article, we examined how to further develop these deficiencies dependent on the standards of the principles of participatory design and user-centered design. We first divide these deficiencies into two types, namely, the inability to meet the needs of children and the inability to meet the needs of parents. Next, we put forward our suggestions for these defects from the three perspectives of functionality, interactivity and visual communication. Finally, we found that our research has certain limitations and raised expectations for future researchers.

Characterizing Child–Computer–Parent Interactions during a Computer-Based Coding Game for 5- to 7-Year-Olds

In this study we characterize ways that interactions children have with their parents and a coding game can support them in engaging in computational thinking. Taking a qualitative approach, we analyzed the video-recordings of 14 families of 5-to-7-year-old children as they played a computer-based coding game in an engineering and CT exhibit at a small science center. The findings revealed a variety of different types of interactions children had with the coding game and with their parents. We discuss the opportunities these interactions provided for children’s engagement in different CT competencies. While aspects of the computer interaction were crucial for children’s CT engagement, some interactions did not occur in ways that encouraged children’s use of CT. Parent–child interactions played a very important role in enabling the children’s computational thinking. Overall, we believe the parent–child and child–computer interactions complemented each other to fully engage children in CT. We provide implications for practitioners and designers who aim to support children’s engagement in different CT competencies.

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.