No Caste, No Crowds, and Robots for All: Children's Values, Hopes, and Fears in the Designs of their Future Classrooms

Paper Title

No Caste, No Crowds, and Robots for All: Children's Values, Hopes, and Fears in the Designs of their Future Classrooms

Publication Info

• Topic area: Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) and design futuring for ethical and empowering technology futures.
• Keywords: Child-Computer Interaction, design futuring, socio-technical imaginaries, critical technology literacy, empowerment, ethics, inclusion, Indian children, future classrooms, participatory design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Children are rarely involved in envisioning or critically examining the future of technologies they interact with, particularly in underrepresented contexts like India.
• Significance: Engaging children in designing their digital futures can empower them, address local challenges, and foster critical perspectives toward technology.
• Motivation and related work: While design futuring has been explored in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Child-Computer Interaction (CCI), there is limited research on engaging children from marginalized contexts, such as Indian public schools, in creating socio-technical imaginaries.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Design futuring workshops with Indian school children to create socio-technical imaginaries of future classrooms, emphasizing empowerment, inclusion, and ethical technology use.
• Novelty:
  1. Engaging Indian children in design futuring to critically imagine future technologies.
  2. Showcasing socio-technical imaginaries from an underrepresented group in CCI research.
  3. Highlighting children’s values, hopes, and fears in their envisioned futures.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a two-day workshop with 31 girls (ages 10–13) in a public school in New Delhi.
  • Activities included discussions on AI and technology, individual and group design tasks, and arts and crafts prototyping.
  • Participants imagined future classrooms and technologies, critically reflecting on their designs' ethical and practical implications.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Children envisioned empowering technologies, such as smart glasses, robot teachers, and animated 3D classrooms, to address challenges like teacher absenteeism, overcrowding, and learning engagement.
  • Ethical values like empathy, care, inclusion, and fairness were central to their designs.
  • Participants critically considered issues like privacy, security, and the fallibility of technology, proposing solutions such as biometric authentication and error prevention mechanisms.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • This study highlights the unique perspectives of Indian children, addressing gaps in CCI research on underrepresented groups and contexts.
  • It demonstrates how design futuring can surface local challenges and empower children to propose creative solutions.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Workshop activities included thematic analysis of participants’ designs, group presentations, and discussions on ethical implications.
  • Data sources: workshop booklets, audio/video recordings, and photographs of prototypes.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small sample size and short workshop duration limit generalizability and depth of critical perspectives.
  • Future work will involve longer-term engagement with more schools and a focus on specific technologies like generative AI and robots.

Summary

This study explored how design futuring workshops enabled Indian children to imagine future classrooms and technologies, addressing local challenges and emphasizing ethical values like inclusion and empathy. The children’s socio-technical imaginaries revealed their hopes for empowerment in learning and their critical reflections on technology’s role and limitations. By amplifying the voices of an underrepresented group, this research contributes to Child-Computer Interaction by showcasing how marginalized children can envision ethical and empowering digital futures. Future work will expand on these findings with larger and longer-term studies.