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 anyone interested to participate without any submission. Please email your interest to register and participate in-person, copying 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.

Please inform us about your in-person participation on or before the 4th of May 2026. You will need to register and pay for the conference and participate in person.

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