Child–computer interaction

Creativity, the process of creating something new and valuable, benefits children by improving their skills and development, encouraging interaction and engagement, and enabling the generation and expression of novel ideas. In recent years, interactive digital tools have emerged to support the user’s creativity in the open-ended creation of new artifacts. However, the question of evaluating the creativity happening in the interplay between children, digital tools, and products is still open. This systematic literature review investigated the evaluations of digital creativity support tools for children and identified 81 peer-reviewed relevant articles from the last 10 years. This research contributes to practitioners and researchers by providing an overview of the evaluations in a framework based on 10 factors (value, novelty, fluency, enjoyment, user feeling, collaboration, expressiveness, immersion, flexibility, and interaction), nine product areas, three approaches, and five methods. The review demonstrated that the evaluations differ widely, and the area lacks a standard evaluation framework. We propose the dimensions of our analysis as an initial framework for situating the evaluation of digital creativity support tools for children that the child–computer interaction community can further refine.

Embodied, co-design and children-specific methods have been gaining traction in Interaction Design for Children, and their potential and benefits are well-established. Yet methods at the intersection of all three areas are scarcer. In addition, design researchers lack tools for the analysis and adaptation of existing methods, and the creation of new ones to suit the particularities of the design project at hand. Here, we present the Think-4-EmCoDe framework for the design and analysis of embodied co-design methods and techniques for children, which foregrounds key qualities in embodied interaction design research: (1) embodied awareness; (2) reflective imaginary; (3) emergence; (4) embodied memory; (5) situated relationality; (6) contingency; (7) playful engagement; (8) play practice; (9) developmental scaffolds; and (10) social dialogue. The framework has been developed drawing from several theories, methods, and frameworks in the areas of co-design and embodied design approaches. This framework allows designers to focus on both general design qualities for embodied experiences and the specific child perspective. We illustrate the use of the framework through the analysis of three design techniques and discuss its potential as an inspirational tool to understand, adapt and refine embodied co-design techniques for children.

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’.

Child–computer interaction (CCI)¹ is a multidisciplinary field of research that concerns the phenomena surrounding the interaction between children and computational and communication technologies. During the last two decades, several endeavors and contributions have significantly furthered CCI research. The pace of children-relevant technological advances and establishment of CCI venues has increased CCI scholarship, and furthered our knowledge and understanding about the relationship between childhood and technology. This editorial article provides an introduction and overview of the special Issue on “review articles in child–computer​ interaction research”. The motivation of this special issue is to highlight review and survey papers that portray contemporary developments in the CCI literature. The contributions come from diverse contexts, cover a wide range of technological affordances, and address a variety of objectives and stakeholders (e.g., designers, learning scientists, policymakers, technologists). In this editorial, we present the background of CCI research, giving a brief overview of the contributions of the special issue, and conclude by highlighting potential emerging issues and challenges of the field.

Cybersecurity for children has received much attention and has become a rapidly growing topic due to the increased availability of the internet to children and their consequent exposure to various online risks. This paper aims to summarize the current findings on cybersecurity awareness research for children and help guide future studies. We have performed a systematic literature review on cybersecurity awareness for children, analyzing 56 peer-reviewed studies that report in depth on various cybersecurity risks and awareness-raising approaches. The results of this review include a list of cybersecurity risks for children, a list of commonly used approaches and theories for raising cybersecurity awareness among children, and a list of factors that researchers have considered when evaluating cybersecurity awareness approaches and solutions.

The aim of this study is to further understanding of children’s conceptions of mental well-being and their ideas for its digital promotion. The study is based on the need to provide children an opportunity to actively participate and share their understanding of mental well-being promotion with others in light of their understanding of what online environments and their design can afford for this promotion. The study was implemented as three subsequent workshops in primary school classrooms comprising four teachers and 79 children aged 9–11 years old. In the first two workshops, children reflected on mental well-being, digital environments they utilize and their possible connections to mental well-being. In the final workshop, children designed interaction designs and concepts for digital well-being promotion. Children broadly structured mental well-being through five main categories: individual factors, social interaction, healthy living, hobbies and creativity, and the absence of mental health problems. Children considered the effects of digital environments as factors that either promote or reduce mental well-being. The use of digital environments and various individual factors were experienced as contributing most to mental well-being. Whereas, children attributed the content of digital environments mainly as diminishing mental well-being. The children’s designs for digital environments raised similar issues to their reflections on the effects of the digital environments. These could be contrasted with design dimensions proposed by earlier research. In addition, the design sessions led children to highlight new factors, reinforcing the importance of children’s participatory interaction design. Children wanted to design environments that were safe in content and function and that did not include cyber-bullying. This study presents a combination of hands-on design research techniques through co-design and conceptual probing with children. It contributes an understanding of how children conceptualize and unite understandings of mental well-being to interaction design.