This is funding to support a pair of events in conjunction with the 2008 Interaction Design for Children conference (IDC08), which will take place June 11-13 in Evanston, Illinois: a Doctoral Consortium which will bring together approximately 9 promising doctoral students from the United States and abroad along with 3 distinguished research faculty; and a pre-conference Workshop on Designing Technologies for Children with Special Needs that will culminate in a keynote lecture that will explore the challenges, opportunities and complexities behind producing international versions of a children's television program. The annual IDC conference is the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of interaction design for children, from the perspective of research as well as practice. IDC08 will strive to expand the reach of previous conferences, both in terms of the number and kind of attendees, and in terms of the number and kind of children that we target with our technologies. The goals of the Doctoral Consortium are to increase the exposure and visibility of the participants' work within the community, to help establish a sense of community among this next generation of researchers, and to help foster their research efforts by providing substantive feedback and guidance from a group of senior researchers in the area in a supportive and interactive environment. Student participants in the Doctoral Consortium will make formal presentations of their work and will receive feedback from a faculty panel; the feedback is geared to helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other research, whether their topics are adequately focused for thesis research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, and whether their results are appropriately analyzed and presented. The Workshop on Designing Technologies for Children with Special Needs will allow intellectual exchange among top researchers and designers in this field. Discussions about challenges for working with special populations, new methods for approaching these challenges, and new directions for research and design will contribute to and expand the research perspective of all participants. During the main conference attendees of both events will present their work in poster sessions, and abstracts will be included in the IDC Conference Proceedings as well in the ACM Digital Library.
Broader Impacts: The pre-conference workshops at IDC08 will bring together some of the best students, researchers and practitioners in the field of interaction design for children, and will thereby afford the younger participants a unique opportunity to gain wider exposure in the community for their innovative ideas while also allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior colleagues in the field. Since the IDC conferences host a diverse group along several dimensions (such as nationality, scientific discipline, and research specialization), participants' horizons will be broadened and new collaborations will emerge, to the future benefit of the field.
