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1. Supporting Caring among Intergenerational Family Members through Family Fitness Tracking

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3421937.3422018  

   Li, Qingyang; Caldeira, Clara; Epstein, Daniel A.; Chen, Yunan (May 2020, Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare)

   null (Ed.)

   We present results from a qualitative study involving eight intergenerational families (27 participants) to understand how a family tracking intervention can help support care among intergenerational family members. Our findings show that family members communicate and stay aware of each other's' health through shared fitness data and conversations triggered by fitness sharing. We identified different challenges and preferences among the three age groups in our study: older adults enjoyed family fitness sharing but often encountered various technical challenges, the middle-aged group served as a key person to care for the rest of the family members, and the young generation could not fully engage in fitness sharing due to their busy schedule and privacy concerns. These findings suggest the design of family fitness sharing to account for the age differences in intergenerational families and support the unique needs of family fitness sharing. 

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2. The Lived Experience of Child-Owned Wearables: Comparing Children's and Parents’ Perspectives on Activity Tracking

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445376  

   Oygür, Iþil; Su, Zhaoyuan; A. Epstein, Daniel; Chen, Yunan (May 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Children are increasingly using wearables with physical activity tracking features. Although research has designed and evaluated novel features for supporting parent-child collaboration with these wearables, less is known about how families naturally adopt and use these technologies in their everyday life. We conducted interviews with 17 families who have naturally adopted child-owned wearables to understand how they use wearables individually and collaboratively. Parents are primarily motivated to use child-owned wearables for children's long-term health and wellbeing, whereas children mostly seek out entertainment and feeling accomplished through reaching goals. Children are often unable to interpret or contextualize the measures that wearables record, while parents do not regularly track these measures and focus on deviations from their children's routines. We discuss opportunities for making naturally-occurring family moments educational to positively contribute to children's conceptual understanding of health, such as developing age-appropriate trackable metrics for shared goal-setting and data reflection. 

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3. Caregivers’ roles in supporting children’s engagement in engineering activities at home

   Paul, K.; Penney, L.; Maltese, A. V.; Simpson, A.; Kim, J. (January 2023, American Society for Engineering Education)

   We began this project with three goals: (1) engage families in engineering activities, (2) increase the awareness of kids and caregivers as to what engineering is, and (3) increase children’ interest in engineering. We focused on caregivers and home environments because of the important role that at-home experiences with STEM play in triggering interest for many individuals who enter STEM professions. We created and distributed four different kits to families interested in engaging in STEM activities at home. Each kit included a challenge around engineering-related content (e.g., circuits, construction) and contained activity instructions (child) and a facilitation guide (caregivers). However, few instructions were given to caregivers about the expectations of their role while engaging with their children. This paper reports on the findings from family engagement in the Watercolor Bot kit. We sought to explore the roles enacted and behaviors utilized by caregivers as they supported their children during the activity. Our findings add to the conversation about how to define and conceptualize caregiver roles and how the home context/setting influences the types of supports caregivers provide. In contrast to emerging work on caregiver support, we argue that it may be more fruitful to think about the types of support (physical, verbal, content, and managerial) offered rather than defining specific roles (e.g., collaborator, project manager, etc.). We provide implications for designing kits and activities to include specific support for caregivers beyond simply providing project-specific instructions that address caregivers’ needs. 

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4. "That's the Way Sighted People Do It": What Blind Parents Can Teach Technology Designers About Co-Reading with Children

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322374  

   Storer, Kevin M.; Branham, Stacy M. (June 2019, DIS '19: Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference)

   Co-reading (when parents read aloud with their children) is an important literacy development activity for children. HCI has begun to explore how technology might support children in co-reading, but little empirical work examines how parents currently co-read, and no work examines how people with visual impairments (PWVI) co-read. PWVIs' perspectives offer unique insights into co-reading, as PWVI often read differently from their children, and (Braille) literacy holds particular cultural significance for PWVI. We observed discussions of co-reading practices in a blind parenting forum on Facebook, to establish a grounded understanding of how and why PWVI co-read. We found that PWVIs' co-reading practices were highly diverse and affected by a variety of socio-technical concerns - and visual ability was less influential than other factors like ability to read Braille, presence of social supports, and children's literacy. Our findings show that PWVI have valuable insights into co-reading, which could help technologies in this space better meet the needs of parents and children, with and without disabilities. 

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5. Co-designing for Education

   Bettencourt, Benjamin; Pera, Maria_Soledad; Kennington, Casey; Landau_Wright, Katherine; Fails, Jerry_Alan (June 2024, IDC 2024 Technology-Enhanced STEM Learning in Childhood Workshop)

   Designing for child-learning involves a number of stakeholders including, but not limited to: teachers, children, administrators, and families. A common approach used to design technologies is co-design. Yet, co-design frequently means different things for different stakeholders. Within the realm of education co-design can be used generally for any interaction with a stakeholder that can be used to guide or inform the design of the desired outcome (product or curriculum) -- often with different stakeholders separately and/or in very small groups (e.g. a group of teachers or 2-3 children, or a classroom if ``testing''). Within the field of child-computer interaction, designing technologies with and for children can involve children and other stakeholders in varying levels of involvement, although within the IDC community it is often a more substantial contribution. We posit that giving child stakeholders an authentic voice in the design of technologies is crucial to fully addressing stakeholder's needs. 

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