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The phenomena surrounding computers has, during the past 10-15 years, broadened to become a non-trivial component of young children’s lives. This broadening is happening at a time when many technologies include dark patterns that induce compulsive use, disregard privacy, and lead to passive, isolating experiences. As a counter to these developments, we build on the 3Cs approach to young children’s technologies (create, connect, and communicate), and propose a 4th C: control. We call for technologies that give children and caregivers control over their activities, time, data, and decision-making. In this paper, we provide a historical and child development perspective to motivate our approach, present its characteristics, illustrate it with examples, and discuss challenges and opportunities. 

In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children’s socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children’s face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children’s sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children’s socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival’s support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival’s components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context. 

In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children’s social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children’s social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field. 

As developmental barriers to children’s access to technology have lowered, dark patterns in apps geared toward children encourage privacy invasions and compulsive use of technology. With StoryCarnival, we use a web app with e-book and printable stories and an adult-operated voice agent to encourage the opposite: mindful and minimal use of technology to support developmentally significant aspects of children’s play. 

There is an opportunity to support shy and neurodivergent children in the development of critical executive function (EF) skills through social play. Through a within-subjects study at a preschool and a remote Zoom observation case study of neurodivergent children and their parents, I have identified the potential for StoryCarnival, a system that supports evidence-based sociodramatic play activities through e-book stories, a play-planning app, and a tangible, adult-controlled voice agent, to empower shy children to more confidently engage with their peers, to motivate neurodivergent children through various modalities, to encourage neurodivergent children to engage in symbolic play, and to afford children different types of agency in different settings. Through my future work, I hope to confirm the validity of these findings and examine the potential for StoryCarnival to support inclusive play in mixed-abilities groups through a large-scale deployment study and field studies. 

for goal-oriented behavior, are critical for children's school outcomes and often lacking when children arrive in elementary school. One of the most promising interventions to address this gap is Tools of the Mind (ToM), a Vygotskyan approach to early childhood education with a strong emphasis on sociodramatic play. One challenge in implementing this kind of play is supporting children in joining play with their peers. In this paper we present a content analysis of an eight-week evaluation comparing implementing ToM-style play with and without technology supports. We found that one specific aspect of the technology supports, a voice agent, played a crucial role in integrating shy children into sociodramatic play. 

High-quality sociodramatic play helps children develop executive function skills which bolster their performance in school. Technology supports can scaffold social play for children who struggle to engage otherwise. This case study examines the impact of a specific system, StoryCarnival, on one 3-year-old child's engagement in sociodramatic play with his peers.comparing this child's participation in sessions using either StoryCarnival or a traditional intervention over eight weeks, StoryCarnival appeared to lower barriers to this child's physical and verbal engagement in social play. Future research could identify whether this pattern may hold for other children who have trouble entering social play with peers. 

There has been a dramatic growth in interactive technology use by children under the age of 5 during the past decade. Despite this growth, children under the age of 5 typically participate only as users or testers in the design process in the overwhelming majority of projects targeting this population presented in key child-computer interaction venues. In this paper we introduce play-based design, an age-appropriate design method to give 3-4-year-old children a voice in the design process. More specifically, we contribute a thorough analysis of the use of existing methods to design technologies for children under the age of 5, a summary of the process that resulted in the development of play-based design, a detailed description of play-based design, a qualitative analysis of our experience implementing play-based design with two groups of children, and a discussion of play-based design's place among other methods, its advantages, and limitations.