IDC

Welcome to IDC 2017, the 16th International ACM Conference on Interaction Design & Children, hosted at Stanford University during June 27 -- 30, 2017.

The IDC (Interaction Design and Children) conference series began in 2002, when a workshop was held in Eindhoven, NL that brought together researchers and practitioners seeking to study how best to develop and design interactive technologies for children. In 2003, the ChiCI group at UCLan hosted the first 'conference' and the community has since held an annual conference, either in Europe or the USA.

Interaction Design and Children is an interdisciplinary international community focusing on the promises and challenges of leveraging technology so as to enable children to participate in nurturing and empowering experiences and bring children's voice and sentiments into this process. The mission of the IDC conference is to bring together researchers, designers, and educators from the cognitive sciences, human-computer interaction, learning sciences, and the various formal and informal educational settings, to explore new forms of technology, design and engaged learning among children. The annual conference incorporates papers, presentations, speakers, workshops, participatory design experiences and discussions on how to create better interactive experiences for children. IDC 2017 offers a wideranging program, supporting and facilitating the exchange of ideas within and between all of these communities.

IDC 2017 theme: "Logo: The Next 50 Years"

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of Logo, the first programming language for children, which materialized a pedagogical vision of empowering children. Logo was created by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon. Sadly, 2017 is also the first Logo year without Seymour Papert, who passed away on July 31, 2016. But in 2016 we also lost two crucial figures in the history of Logo: Marvin Minsky and Edith Ackermann. And so it now is up to all of us to carry forth the legacies of Marvin, Edith, and Seymour --- indeed an honorable calling for the IDC community. This legacy is greater than turtles, recursion, and coding. It is the legacy of envisioning new resources and bold pedagogies that invite children into previously inaccessible content. More broadly, it is the legacy of creating for children environments where each will find the gears of their childhood, early experiences and engaging practices that are formative of lifelong academic passions, as Seymour wrote back in 1980 in his groundbreaking book, Mindstorms.

The IDC 2017 theme, Logo: The Next 50 Years, thus pays homage to Papert's powerful educational ideas in celebration of his achievement --- lifelong and beyond. And so, as we now begin the next 50 years of the Logo legacy, how should we proceed? What new opportunities do we foresee ahead, what new challenges? How do Papert's theoretical assertions, design frameworks, and educational vision speak to current turns in the research that inform our collective and varied IDC efforts? What technological innovations better enable us to realize his principles in the form of construction and instruction materials? What is becoming of Papert's quest for epistemological pluralism, global equity, the right for a second chance, gender equality, access, intellectual ownership, and emancipation?

Let us revisit the constructionist vision to reimagine education in the 21st century, where all children engage, own, and enact powerful ideas through a range of expressive media. Many of Papert's futuristic ideas from Mindstorms are now taken for granted, such as the importance of fostering students' computational reasoning, the inherent roles of the body, society, and culture in creative problem solving, and making space for diverse cognitive predilections.Ironically, a mark of Papert's lasting influence is that his "psychedelic" ideas from the 60's and 70's have been assimilated so well into mainstream educational discourse and practice that we just assume those ideas were always here... It has been an epic voyage, and it is far from over. We are not there yet.

IDC 2017 has therefore invited scholars, designers, and practitioners to celebrate Logo by sharing their work on technologies that improve all children's opportunities to interact with expressive media, engage in new literacies, and develop powerful ideas. We sought contribution on emerging technologies for children, design, and evaluation of interactive experiences, as well as new methods, approaches, and theoretical perspectives.

The conference theme is instantiated at IDC 2017 in the form of a special panel chaired by Profs. Jeanne Bamberger, Mike Eisenberg, and Richard Noss.