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When the technology encompasses some form of intelligence or agency in the form of robots, virtual agents or artificial intelligence, understanding the reasoning behind their actions and decisions becomes an integral part of the interaction. This challenge extends beyond mere interaction to ensure these technological entities engage with children in an understandable and transparent manner. Given the current emergence of research in explainability and transparency within human-robot interaction, a noticeable gap emerges when the target population shifts to children. Several challenges have contributed to this gap, including the more difficult job of considering children's unique cognitive and emotional needs or aligning the complexity of the technology and the developmental stages of young users. As we advance the field through generating more effective explanations or transparent behaviours in robots and agents, transitioning these advancements to more child-centric contexts demands a deeper understanding of how children perceive and comprehend technological behaviours. This workshop explores this gap and how we could tackle the critical role of developing technologies, e.g., robots, AI, and toys that are more transparent and express more explainable behaviours. We aim to initiate discussions on the importance of understanding children's perception of different technologies and approaches to generate and evaluate explainability features that are tailored for child users interacting with autonomous agents and robots. Simultaneously, we address the challenges inherent in this context, including potential biases in explainability and the risks associated with deception in child-technology interaction., Part of ISBN 9798400704420QC 20240719

Motivation & challenge: Computer Science suffers from a lack of diversity that gets perpetuated by the most dominant and visible role models. The community is doing itself a disservice by upholding techno-solutionism, short-term efficiency, and busyness as central values. Those models are created and consolidated over time through social and cultural interactions that increase the perpetration of gender stereotypes. Exposing people to diverse types of role models and stories can contribute to making them more aware of the complexity of reality and inspire them taking better informed decisions- making on their career paths. Likewise, showing different role models to stakeholders in society and industry can contribute to increase the workforce diversity in the profession of computing as well as to make a shift towards the consolidation of different role models. This, in turn, may contribute to strengthen resilience and adequacy for solving issues related to diversity, equality and inclusion in Computer Science and more importantly allowing women take the ownership of their career path. Goal: To encourage the dissemination, sharing and creation of stories that show diverse career pathways to address gender stereotypes created by dominant stories in Computer Science. We tackle this issue by developing a framework for storytelling around female scientists and professionals to show a diversity of possibilities for women in pursuing an academic career based on the ownership of their pathways. Method: We apply a qualitative approach to analyse stories collected using the auto-ethnography and use thematic analysis to unpack the components of what in these stories contribute to building the academic path in the field of Computer Science. Authors used their own professional histories and experiences as input. They highlighted the central values of their research visions and approaches to life and emphasised how they have helped to take decisions that shaped their professional

This work presents an autonomous approach that explores the dynamic generation of relaxing soundscapes for games and artistic installations. Differently from past works, this system can generate music and images simultaneously, preserving human intent and coherency. We present our algorithm for the generation of audiovisual instances and also a system based on this approach, verifying the quality of the outcomes it can produce in light of current approaches for the generation of images and music. We also instigate the discussion around the new paradigm in arts, where the creative process is delegated to autonomous systems, with limited human participation. Our user study (N=74) shows that our approach overcomes current deep learning models in terms of quality, being recognized as human production, as if the outcome were being generated out of an endless musical improvisation performance.

This SIG will provide child-computer interaction researchers and practitioners, as well as other interested CHI attendees, an opportunity to discuss topics related to developing participatory methods to consider the ethics of emerging technologies for children. While the community has extensively debated on ethical issues, we have not had ample discussion of methods to study the ethical implications of emerging technologies. Consequently, we have been largely reactive and have not made significant contributions to public discussions on these topics, leaving these largely to experts from other fields. Our community is well-placed to contribute unique perspectives by leveraging its expertise in participatory methods, combining expert views with those of stakeholders, including children.

This paper presents the ongoing development of the clip:bit, a clipboard-style micro:bit V2 extension for biodiversity monitoring in schools and community groups. The clip:bit is one component in a wider system to enable schools to engage in longitudinal studies of biodiversity in school grounds and local areas, monitoring the impact of landscape management and children's ecological activities, such as the introduction wildflower meadows or planting hedgerows. The clip:bit was designed in response to needs identified during fieldwork in schools. We describe how the design addresses these needs and point to the way the clip:bit fits into a wider plan for data management and data visualisation. We also discuss the application of an existing micro:bit peripheral, the Kitronik Game Controller, for biodiversity monitoring and compare their use for different cases.

Providing a good understanding to children and educators on the Internet of Things (IoT) means to make them aware about where the data goes, how it is stored, and what it is stored on. In this perspective many commercial IoT systems have been shown to be unsuitable for this purpose especially when used in an educational context. They do not create user centric data collection opportunities; many of their IoT sensors that send data offsite to an online cloud create gaps in knowledge; the sensors themselves are not transparent: it's not clear what data they are collecting and how, and they are not easily compatible with school networks. Classroom Cloudlet addresses this issue. This demonstration presents an end-to-end IoT like system that includes a mobile, tangible, and transparent classroom cloudlet. Classroom Cloudlet aims to allow data from multiple devices to be easily shared, collated and analysed without using the Internet, but while still educating students about IoT and cloud concepts. The classroom cloudlet aims to be a physical representation of a cloud in an IoT system; visualise the movement of data around the system; provide a web front-end for students to view and create custom visualisations of their data. Classroom Cloudlet aims to gives the educator and the children full control and ownership of their data.

The purpose of our research is to use design as a mean to support children becoming more aware of stereotypes in their own artefacts. We have been facing this challenge leveraging on Digital StoryTelling (DST) as a powerful instrument to detect children's beliefs and values including those connecting to gender. In addition, considering the role of social interactions in creating and reproducing gender stereotypes in children we have been focusing on the collaborative creation of digital stories to investigate stereotypes as a cultural product. The goal of the paper is to give an account of our process of digging into this topic and our design pathway in developing and assess a DST prototype directed to raise children's awareness. Our work main contribution is to spread insight on our approach and support the HCI community to replicate it to challenge the negative effect of stereotypes, and to provide new knowledge on how gender stereotype awareness could be raised among children through the collaborative creation of DST. As a final research contribution we provide a set of design recommendations to address the design of a collaborative DST tool for raising stereotype awareness.

Failures are not reported enough in the literature as the pressure of publishing successful stories has moved us away from considering that even unsuccessful stories can be equally relevant to increase knowledge in research. Analyzing failures can be a great learning opportunity for the community of researchers. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a research that investigated the challenges experienced when designing and running studies with children. The study began with a literature review which led to an inquiry focused on exploring failures within the Child-Computer Interaction community by interviewing 14 researchers. Interviews were analyzed in the vein of the thematic analysis approach. We deliver three themes (unpredictability, technology targeted at adults, children willing to achieve the goal), three action points (the context, the technology, and the activity) and a paradigm shift from "failures need to be hidden"to "failure is a learning opportunity".

Children's fears and hopes regarding technology play a crucial role in influencing its development, impact, and social acceptance. Although studies investigate children's perceptions of social robots, there is a need to better understand how hopes and fears influence children's views of the future. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a study in which we explored 60 children's (aged 8-14) perceptions of social robots using ten fictional scenarios. From data analysis, we elicited four major themes that become the pillars of a model that represent children's perception of social robots (agency, comprehension, socioemotional features, and physicality). The model shows the complex and often paradoxical nature of children's acceptance (hope) and rejection (fear) of social robots in their lives. Our outcome provides the foundations of a new responsible approach in analyzing and designing social robots for children using hopes and fear as a lens.

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ĝ€?FOR VERIFICATION>create' scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

This short paper introduces Energy in Schools, an interactive platform designed to improve energy efficiency in UK schools through a combination of environmental measurement and behavioural change. Uniquely, Energy in Schools is designed to empower all the stakeholders within a school, including children, teachers and leadership groups to reduce their energy costs and carbon emissions. The paper reports on the motivation and design of the platform, a discussion on how interactive materials and educational activities were developed to raise awareness and understanding of energy and the climate emergency, how children led activities were used to instrument and analyses energy use via child friendly Internet of Things technologies. Finally, an analysis of its success in encouraging behavioural change through the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a live deployment across 20 schools is presented. Overall, it was observed that encouraging multiple stakeholders to work together interactively can decrease energy consumption in the majority of schools by over 5%.

Children often perceive abstract concepts such as chemistry as difficult, and teachers struggle to convey content knowledge in these subjects. In this pictorial, we address the need to promote the interest for chemistry in children by developing a multi-layered Augmented Reality serious game that uses storytelling, character design and game mechanics to connect and engage young audiences with chemistry: the Periodic Fable an Augmented Journey. Our contribution relies on the design and development of the system to convey content knowledge about the Periodic Table while fostering the children's interest and challenging their possible daunting perception of the domain. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study using a mixed-method approach engaging 21 young participants from a public school to assess the learning gains and the role of storytelling through levels of narrative transportation. The results show positive perception and learning outcome of chemistry, narrative transportation showcasing an opportunity for a unique form to approach chemistry using an edutainment format.

Gender stereotypes can harm children well being, impact on their career path an also led to discrimination behaviour. Our research aims at challenging children's gender stereotypes and exploring how a Digital StoryTelling tool can be be designed to detect these at early age. Based on the literature review we have developed a prototype named Genderalize that aims at stimulating children's reflection on their stereotypes. The tool was developed in a co-design process involving nine experts in children-computer interaction. The final version was tested by nine the adults stakeholders (e.g. guardians, parents, teachers). The outcomes provide thoughtful considerations on how Genderalize helped the detection of gender stereotypes by the means of a contextualised narrative and the reflective exercises. Results' impact was limited due to the small sample, but the outcomes were very useful to move on to the next step of the project and inspire new developments.

Failures are not reported enough in the literature as the pressure of publishing successful stories has moved us away from considering that even unsuccessful stories can be equally relevant to increase knowledge in research. Analyzing failures can be a great learning opportunity for the community of researchers. In this paper, we present the outcomes of a research that investigated the challenges experienced when designing and running studies with children. The study began with a literature review which led to an inquiry focused on exploring failures within the Child-Computer Interaction community by interviewing 14 researchers. Interviews were analyzed in the vein of the thematic analysis approach. We deliver three themes (unpredictability, technology targeted at adults, children willing to achieve the goal), three action points (the context, the technology, and the activity) and a paradigm shift from “failures need to be hidden” to “failure is a learning opportunity”.

Child Computer Interaction has become a field in its own right but it relies on its parent disciplines, HCI, CS, IxD, to train its academics. Research practice in CCI borrows heavily from HCI with an emphasis on the participation of users in research. Training academics to work with children is essential within CCI but this is seldom talked about and in many cases, students are left to learn from mistakes, especially if they are working in groups where there is little expertise in working with children. In this workshop we aim to look at what can go wrong when working with children in a range of contexts including design, evaluation, and research, in schools, homes and other venues, on many different types of projects. We will ‘create’ scenarios of working with participants and seek to identify potential problems and solutions with the aim of building a resource for CCI academics that helps minimize failure and maximise success.

The concept of gamified interactive models and its novel extensions, such as playification, has been widely approached in order to engage users in many fields. In fields such as HCI and AI, however, these approaches were not yet employed for supporting users to create different forms of artworks, like a musical corpus. While allowing novel forms of interactivity with partially-autonomous systems, these techniques could also foster the emergence of artworks not limited to experts. Hence, in this paper we introduce the concept of meta-interactivity for compositional interfaces, which extends an individual's capabilities by the translation of an effort into a proficiency. We present how this approach can be effective through a novel system that enables non-experts to compose coherent musical pieces through the use of imagetic elements in a virtual environment. We conduct experiments with a population of musical experts and non-experts, showing that non-experts were able to learn and create high-quality musical productions through our interactive approach.