Social media has become a primary source of entertainment and education for children globally. While much attention has been given to children's online well-being, a pressing concern often goes unnoticed: the pervasive data harvesting underlying social media and its manipulative impact on undermining children's autonomy. In this paper, we present CHAITok, an Android mobile application designed to enhance children's sense of autonomy over their data on social media. Through 27 user study sessions with 109 children aged 10--13, we offer insights into the current lack of data autonomy among children regarding their online information, and how we can foster children's sense of data autonomy through a socio-technical journey. Our findings inspire design recommendations to respect children's values, support children's evolving autonomy, and design for children's digital rights. We emphasize data autonomy as a fundamental right for children, call for further research, design innovation, and policy changes on this critical issue.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642294
Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children's learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3--5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children's learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642806
Like many parents, visually impaired parents (VIPs) read books with their children. However, research on accessible reading technologies predominantly focuses on blind adults reading alone or sighted adults reading with blind children, such that the motivations, strategies, and needs of blind parents reading with their sighted children are still largely undocumented. To address this gap, we interviewed 13 VIPs with young children. We found that VIPs (1) sought familial intimacy through reading with their child, often prioritizing intimacy over their own access needs, (2) took on many types of access labor to read with their children, and (3) desired novel assistive technologies (ATs) for reading that prioritize intimacy while reducing access labor. We contribute the notion of Intimate AT, along with a demonstrative design space, which together constitute a new design paradigm that draws attention to intimacy as a facet of both independently and collaboratively accessible ATs.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642763
Social robots, particularly in assisting children with autism, have exhibited positive impacts on mental health. While prior studies concentrated on social robots in the Global North, there's limited exploration in the Global South. It's essential to comprehend special educators' perspectives for effective integration in resource-constrained settings. Our mixed-methods approach, involving interviews, workshops, and a panel discussion with 25 educators in India, uncovers challenges and opportunities in integrating social robots into autism interventions. The findings highlight the urgent need to democratise the benefits of social robotics. Special educators express concerns about their functional capacity and fear potential redundancy due to the replacement of human efforts by social robots. Despite initial scepticism, professionals suggest various ways to incorporate social robots, emphasising the importance of technological innovation in reshaping and enhancing their roles in autism therapy. We discuss the implications of these findings for developing context-aware solutions and policy-level initiatives necessary in resource-constrained settings.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642836