International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction最新文献

Research interest in the potential of educational technology to support young children as they learn to read has significantly increased during the last decades. These studies typically adopt a media comparison approach (comparing learning with one instructional medium vs. another instructional medium) or a value-added approach (comparing learning with a standard version vs. one with an added feature). We aimed to systematically review both types of studies on the effectiveness of educational technology for enhancing preschoolers’ early literacy development. Our systematic search in four databases resulted in 67 studies eligible for inclusion. Our analyses addressed three research questions: (a) Is educational technology effective in stimulating preschoolers' early literacy development? (b) Which features of educational technology and its implementation are associated with its effectiveness? (c) Which child-related characteristics are associated with its effectiveness? Results show that the media comparison studies provide some evidence for the effectiveness of educational technology in early literacy instruction, but supported by medium to large effect sizes for only part of the studies. Moreover, features of educational technology and child-related characteristics were less frequently investigated, with a small number of studies per investigated feature or characteristic. The small number of studies and limited availability of effect sizes does not allow to draw strong evidence-based conclusions related to these research questions. Future studies are needed to deepen current insights into the effectiveness of educational technology for early literacy instruction, and especially the contribution of specific educational technology features and child-related characteristics to its effectiveness.

AI-enabled virtual voice assistants have eased user interaction and user experience. The current study aims to understand how teenagers interact and engage with voice assistants. The rationale of usage, perceptions, patterns and expectations of teenagers from smart speakers has been explored within the framework of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) model. The study uses an interpretive qualitative research method to gain in-depth insights, empirical details, and narrative aspects of user experiences of smart speakers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 36 teenagers pursuing high school in the age group 13–15 years during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results indicated that all seven variables (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivations, habit, and privacy concerns) impact the usage of smart speakers. The study also ascertains that hedonic motivation is a significant driving factor in the UTAUT2 model.

Embedding cultural ways of knowing and being of non-dominant communities into learning tools and environments often falls short of authentically representing the people they are meant to serve. Designers have used principles and methods of Participatory Design (PD) to work alongside minoritized communities due to its roots in democratic participation. However, following PD methods may fall short when infusing the community’s culture and values in the design in a way that is responsive to the community’s preferences, intentions and aspirations. In the field of education, researchers and practitioners have designed teaching and learning tools and environments by leveraging the cultural wealth and ways of knowing of minoritized learners through an asset-based perspective, as exemplified by Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). In this paper we present a case study for the development of a mobile application to extend physical playful learning spaces, designed with local low-income Latine families to foster fun family learning. We highlight how our design practices helped us center youth voices and community ways of knowing and being, particularly in the stages of ideation, concept, testing, and prototyping. Our case study reflects how we foregrounded cultural values and practices into our educational mobile application. Through these practices, we present concrete examples and initial building blocks for future work towards building a Culturally Sustaining Design Framework.

Conversational AIs such as Alexa and ChatGPT are increasingly ubiquitous in young people’s lives, but these young users are often not afforded the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of these technologies. One of the most powerful ways to foster this learning is to empower youth to create AI that is personally and socially meaningful to them. We have built a novel development environment, AMBY–“AI Made By You”–for youth to create conversational agents. AMBY was iteratively designed with and for youth aged 12–13 through contextual inquiry and usability studies. AMBY is designed to foster AI learning with features that enable users to generate training datasets and visualize conversational flow. We report on results from a two-week summer camp deployment, and contribute design implications for conversational AI authoring tools that empower AI learning for youth.

Nature connections in early childhood are being lost due to increasingly urban and managed lives. Yet, emerging research is signalling the usefulness of digital technologies in reconnecting children with the natural world. This review scopes the last ten years of research reporting child-nature-technology interactions to identify: (1) methods, (2) approaches to children's agency in research and design, (3) technologies used and the experiences they produced. After screening, a search of seven databases produced 24 papers that were analysed across these three dimensions. We describe the current research and make recommendations including more granular reporting of participation, increased engagement with theory and nature connection frameworks, and consideration of methods that encourage children's agency at earlier stages in design work. We also suggest novel directions when designing for nature experiences that encourage personal meaning-making, relationality, and build child competencies for a rapidly changing world.

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.

The Internet has become an important environment in everyday life of children and youth. Consequently, understanding basic Internet concepts has been listed as a target competence in many school curricula. However, any constructive approach to teaching concepts of the Internet should take into account learners’ initial conceptions, shaped by daily experiences, that they bring into the classroom. Based on a systematic literature review of research published between January 2000 and March 2022, we synthesized more than 400 descriptions reported by children and youth and classified them into five categories: (1) the structure of the Internet, (2) responsibility for the operation of the Internet, (3) web search engines and their function, (4) transmission techniques and (5) services of the Internet, as well as into subcategories that encompass commonly found kinds of conceptions within these categories. In addition, we classified all conceptions into three types: (1) intuitive, (2) elaborate and (3) misconception. The results show that children and youth hold more intuitive than elaborate conceptions. They also hold many misconceptions in all five categories. Although it has been suggested that age or user’s online experiences may be important factors for shaping elaborate conceptions about the Internet, we observed that many intuitive conceptions and misconceptions seem to be persistent across different age groups. This indicates that these factors, although necessary, but may not be sufficient for developing adequate conceptions. Instead, we argue that an elaborate conception of the structure of the Internet requires explicit learning and instruction. Finally, we explain implications of our findings for education and for future research.

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.