Data Vis Activities for Children

Hands-on Exploration of Activities & Challenges around Visual, Physical and Tangible Representations for Play and Data Literacy

This ACM IDC workshop will bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners from children-interaction design, data visualization and physicalization, and related fields to explore the design of physical, visual, and tangible activities for engaging children with data. It will be held on the 22nd of June, 2026 at IDC 2026 conference in Brighton, UK.

Data literacy is recognised as a fundamental skill in early education, prompting growing interest across education, data visualization, and child–computer interaction in hands-on, child-centred approaches to data engagement. However, knowledge of best practice in data literacy and analysis remains fragmented across communities, while advances in AI introduce new opportunities and challenges for designing data-driven activities for children.

To address this gap, the goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers, educators and practitioners from education, data visualization, child-computer interaction and related fields to map out and discuss current practices and challenges when designing and running data-driven activities with children.

Link to the full proposal: IDC 2026 Workshop Proposal

Workshop Goals

Workshop activities will touch upon questions regarding activity design, activity context, the role of collaboration, ethical considerations, and evaluation. Questions discussed at the workshop will include but are not limited to:

What is the role of play, curiosity, and open-ended exploration when designing data-driven activities for children?
How can data-driven activities be integrated into different subject areas (e.g., STEM learning, arts, languages)?
How do different material choices and modalities (e.g., visual vs. physical, digital vs. analogue) influence activity dynamics and uptake?
What ethical aspects need to be considered when designing data-driven activities with and for children?
How can data-driven activities leverage shared experiences and collaborative thinking?
How can we evaluate data-driven activities in terms of engagement and learning, data- and visualization literacy?

Call for Contributions

The half-day workshop will be in-person-only and include hands-on activities and panel discussions. It will also offer networking opportunities through small-group conversations in World Café-style .

We invite two types of submissions to the workshop:

Activities (2-6 pages) that have been designed for children or that may work well for children to promote data-driven play and data literacy through visual, physical, and tangible representations in the wider sense. For submitting an activity, please follow our template, that will help you describe your activity in terms of context, targeted age group, activity instructions, materials required, and findings and challenges encountered.

Activity authors will be invited to present their activity, and we will trial selected activities at the workshop in small groups.

Reports (1-2 pages) that reflect on experiences with or perspectives on designing and running data-driven activities with children. These reports may reflect on the questions listed above. Reports may be practice-oriented, speculative, and/or draw on existing theories in education and visualization, for example. Reports do not follow a particular template, but should not exceed 1-2 pages.

Authors of reports will be invited to present their perspectives in the form of a panel discussion at the workshop.

We accept double/single-blind submissions emailed to the lead author. At least one author for each paper or educator report must register and attend the conference in person.

Important Dates

All deadlines are at 11:59pm (23:59) AoE (Anywhere on Earth)

April 7, 2026: Activities and Report Submission
May 1, 2026: Author Notification
May 6, 2026: Camera-ready Submission
June 22, 2026: Workshop day

Submissions will be accepted through email. Please email your submissions copying to Dushani Perera, Christina Stoiber, and Andres Ramirez-Duque at d.perera@ed.ac.uk, christina.stoiber@ustp.at, and andres.ramirez-duque@glasgow.ac.uk.

Organizers

DUSHANI PERERA, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

CHRISTINA STOIBER, University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria

ANDRÉS A. RAMÍREZ-DUQUE, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

JONATHAN HANCOCK, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

AYÇA ATABEY, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

KIM SAUVÉ, University of West England, United Kingdom

SUSAN LECHELT, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

ANDREW MANCHES, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

UTA HINRICHS, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Advisory Board.

STEPHEN BREWSTER, Professor of Human Computer Interaction, University of Glasgow

JOHN VINES, Chair of Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh