Search for: All records

Many children are growing up in a “digital-by-default” world, where technologies mediate many of their interactions. There is emerging consensus that those who design technology must support children’s privacy and security. However, privacy and security are complex concepts that are challenging to design for, and centering the interests of children is similarly difficult. Through a document analysis of 90 HCI publications, we examine what problems and solutions designing for children’s privacy and security addresses and how this research engages with children. Applying Solove’s privacy taxonomy, we find that research addresses a range of problems related to information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion at the organizational, system, and individual levels. Children’s participation in this research is largely limited to providing feedback rather than helping to guide the research itself. Based on these findings, we offer recommendations for designers to sharpen their privacy and security contributions and center children in their work. 

With computational thinking (CT) emerging as a prominent component of 21st century science education, equipping teachers with the necessary tools to integrate CT into science lessons becomes increasingly important. One of these tools is confidence in their ability to carry out the integration of CT. This confidence is conceptualized as self-efficacy: the belief in one’s ability to perform a specific task in a specific context. Self-reported self-efficacy in teaching has shown promise as a measure of future behavior and is linked to teacher performance. Current measures of teacher self-efficacy to integrate CT are limited, however, by narrow conceptualizations of CT, oversight of survey design research, and limited evidence of instrument validity. We designed a valid and reliable measure of Teacher Self-Efficacy for integrating Computational Thinking in Science (T-SelECTS) that fits a single latent factor structure. To demonstrate the instrument’s value, we collected data from 58 pre-service teachers who participated in a CT module within their science methods course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. We found evidence of significant development in pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy for integrating CT into science instruction. We discuss how the T-SelECTS instrument could be used in teacher education courses and professional development to measure change in self-efficacy. 

We introduce PrototypAR, an Augmented Reality (AR) system that allows children to rapidly build complex systems using paper crafts and to test their designs in a digital environment. PrototypAR combines lo-fidelity prototyping to facilitate iterative design, real-time AR feedback to scaffold learning, and a virtual simulation environment to support personalized experiments. Informed by three participatory design sessions, we developed three PrototypAR applications: build-a-bike, build-a-camera, and build-an-aquarium---each highlights different aspects of our system. To evaluate PrototypAR, we conducted four single-session qualitative evaluations with 21 children working in teams. Our findings show how children build and explore complex systems models, how they use AR scaffolds, and the challenges they face when conducting experiments with their own prototypes.