Designing for children: blending HCI and Action Research

The growing diffusion of digital technology in everyday life is bringing into the realm of technological products new users with novel demands, which translate into novel design and research issues, like in the case of children-oriented Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems. It is recognized the need for developing empirically grounded guidelines that take into account the actual context in which children-oriented technology is going to be used, and for a rapid diffusion of researchers/designers findings. Action Research (AR) appears as a useful approach able to assist in practical problem solving while at the same time expanding scientific knowledge by generating/testing new theories/methods. In this paper we report on our experience within an AR project aimed at conceiving a novel children-oriented data gathering techniques and using it for the context-of-use analysis of the TERENCE project, which developed a TEL system for children.