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In this work, we discuss the findings emerging from co-design sessions between children ages 6 to 11 and adults, which were conducted to advance knowledge on how to best support children using well-known search tools for online information discovery. Specifically, we argue that by leveraging scaffolding, gamification techniques, and design choices via an application, it is possible to enhance children’s habits related to query formulation. Outcomes from this preliminary exploration reveal that gameplay incentives (e.g. levels, points, and other incentives like customization) are needed and effective in motivating further interaction with the application, which in turn leads to further utilization of the scaffolding needed to positively impact query formulation. 

Children often interact with search engines within a classroom context to complete assignments or discover new information. To successfully identify relevant resources among those presented on a search engine results page (SERP), users must first be able to comprehend the text included in SERP snippets. While this task may be straightforward for an adult user, children may encounter obstacles in terms of readability and comprehension when attempting to navigate a SERP. Previous research has demonstrated the positive impact of including visual cues on a SERP as relevance signals to guide children toward appropriate resources. In this work, we explore the effect of supplying visual cues related to readability and text difficulty on children’s (ages 6-12) navigation of a SERP. Using quantitative data collected from user-interface interactions and qualitative data gathered from participant interviews, we analyze the impact of these visual cues on children’s selection of results on a SERP when carrying out information discovery tasks. 

Children are exposed to technology at home and school at very young ages, often using family mobile devices and educational apps. It is therefore critical that they begin learning about privacy and security concepts during their elementary school years, rather than waiting until they are older. Such skills will help children navigate an increasingly connected world and develop agency over their personal data, online interactions, and online security. In this paper, we explore how a simple technique---a ''Would Your Rather'' (WYR) game involving hypothetical privacy and security scenarios---can support children in working through the nuances of these types of situations and how educators can leverage this approach to support children's privacy and security learning. We conducted three focus groups with 21 children aged 7-12 using the WYR activity and interviewed 13 elementary school teachers about the use of WYR for facilitating privacy and security learning. We found that WYR provided a meaningful opportunity for children to assess privacy and security risks, consider some of the social and emotional aspects of privacy and security dilemmas, and assert their agency in a manner typically unavailable to children in an adult-centric society. Teachers highlighted connections between privacy and security dilemmas and children's social and emotional learning and offered additional insights about using this WYR technique in and beyond their classrooms. Based on these findings, we highlight four opportunities for using WYR to support children in engaging with privacy and security concepts from an early age.

 

The role that technology plays in supporting children at school and at home is more prominent than ever before due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This has prompted us to focus the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children \& Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) workshop on what the lasting changes will be to the design and development of child information retrieval systems. After two years, are information retrieval systems used more in and out of the classroom? Are they more interactive, more or less personalized? What is the impact on the research and business community? Are there long-term and unexpected changes on the design, ethics, and algorithms? The primary goal of our workshop continues to be to build community by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders from various backgrounds and disciplines to understand and advance information retrieval systems for children. 

In this paper, we explore how children engage with search engine result pages (SERP) generated by a popular search API in response to their online inquiries. We do so to further understand children navigation behaviour. To accomplish this goal, we examine search logs produced as a result of children (ages 6 to 12), using metrics commonly used to operationalize engagement, including: position of clicks, time spent hovering, and the sequence of navigation on a SERP. We also investigate the potential connection between the text complexity of SERP snippets and engagement. Our findings verify that children engage more frequently with SERP results in higher ranking positions, but that engagement does not decrease linearly as children navigate to lower ranking positions. They also reveal that children generally spend more time hovering on snippets with more complex readability levels (i.e., harder to read) than snippets on the lower end of the readability spectrum. 

In this paper, we take a step towards understanding how to design search engine results pages (SERP) that encourage children’s engagement as they seek for online resources. For this, we conducted a participatory design session to enable us to elicit children’s preferences and determine what children (ages 6–12) find lacking in more traditional SERP. We learned that children want more dynamic means of navigating results and additional ways to interact with results via icons. We use these findings to inform the design of a new SERP interface, which we denoted CHIRP. To gauge the type of engagement that a SERP incorporating interactive elements–CHIRP–can foster among children, we conducted a user study at a public school. Analysis of children’s interactions with CHIRP, in addition to responses to a post-task survey, reveals that adding additional interaction points results in a SERP interface that children prefer, but one that does not necessarily change engagement levels through clicks or time spent on SERP. 

Internet usage continues to increase among children ages 12 and younger. Because their digital interactions can be persistently stored, there is a need for building an understanding and foundational knowledge of privacy. We describe initial investigations into children's understanding of privacy from a Contextual Integrity (CI) perspective by conducting semi-structured interviews. We share results -- that echo what others have shown -- that indicate children have limited knowledge and understanding of CI principles. We also share an initial exploration of utilizing participatory design theater as a possible educational mechanism to help children develop a stronger understanding of important privacy principles 

As children search the internet for materials, they o en turn to search engines that, unfortunately, o er children li le support as they formulate queries to initiate the search process or examine resources for relevance. While some solutions have been proposed to address this, inherent to this issue is the need to evaluate the e ectiveness of these solutions. We posit that the evaluation of the diverse aspects involved in the search process – from query suggestion generation to resource retrieval – requires a complex, multi-faceted approach that draws on evaluation methods utilized in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, natural language processing, education, and psychology.