“We’re seeing a rapid growth in technologies for children in their early years. Our goal is to bring together all those who are passionate about understanding their influence and designing better”
Andrew Manches, Uta Hinrichs, Susan Lechelt (CID cluster leads)
Priorities
We draw together academics and non-academics across disciplines and organisations who seek to understand how children interaction with digital, and non-digital, designs across settings, and how we can use this knowledge to develop, with children, more beneficial products and experiences.
We adopt a critical approach, whilst also pursuing opportunities to scale the impact of our work, including through commercialisation where we consider beneficial.
We strive to include multiple partners and children in our research and design process, striving to ensure our work benefits all children.
We are based in Edinburgh but seek to engage with all those interested in this growing field nationally and internationally. We align closely with international communities: Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) and Interaction Design and Children (IDC).
Events
Upcoming events and workshops will be posted here.
Digital Method of the Month: What LLMs Can and Cannot Do
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. During this session, we will introduce the concept of Large Language Models (LLMs), discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and explore how they can be effectively integrated into research workflows.
Getting Started with Python for Research
This course will introduce attendees to the basic concepts and features of Python programming language. The goal is for participants to feel comfortable with creating simple Python programs and provide them with the autonomy and confidence required to progress independently.
Getting Started with R for Research
This beginner-friendly course will focus on developing skills and a fundamental understanding of R and RStudio. Participants will develop a familiarity with the principles and functionalities of R and RStudio, allowing them to confidently apply these, or indeed seek out new concepts, for their current and future research.
Network Analysis from Scratch: Intro to Gephi
This three-session course introduces attendees to Gephi, a free and open-source network analysis and visualisation tool. The main focus will be on social network analysis, and attendees will have the opportunity to apply their own dataset in Gephi.
Digital Method of the Month: Geospatial Data and GIS
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. The method of this month is GIS, or Geographic Information Systems. GIS is a computer system that combines maps and databases to help people create, manage, and analyse information about places.
From Images to Text: Working with OCR
This course is an introduction to extracting text from images and scanned PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques. In the course, we will give you an overview of text extraction, demonstrate how OCR works in practice, using free, ready-to-use tools that are widely available.
Collecting Data from the Web: Foundations of Webscraping
This workshop introduces the fundamentals of scraping user-generated content from the web using R or Python. The session will be hands-on, working through the process of scraping a selected static website step by step, before concluding with a discussion of the limitations of scraping and the challenges posed by more complex dynamic sites.
Introduction to Geographical Data with QGIS
This course will focus on developing skills and a fundamental understanding of Geospatial data and the basic functionalities of QGIS. Each session begins with a presentation that introduces the theoretical principles and is followed by a guided practical exercise where these principles can be tested and applied, as well as developed upon. Please bring a mouse with you to the session.
Digital Method of the Month: Data Visualisation
The digital method of the month meeting is a safe space to freely discuss the practicalities of learning and implementing a new digital skill in your research. A big part of conveying research results hinges on how these results are presented. Join us to discuss the main principles of effective and reproducible data visualisation.
Silent Disco: Foundations of Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is the process of determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral. Its use has become relatively widespread, including being used to analyse customer feedback, social media, user surveys, and more. This workshop will cover how it works; pros and cons; using it on text, user feedback and online sources.
CID monthly reading groups
If you are interested in getting involved in our reading groups, we’d love to hear from you.
They are typically held on the second Wednesday of each month.
Projects
Our projects explore how children interact with their world, how we can design to influence interaction positively, and then scale this work to positively impact children’s everyday experiences.
Featured
Meet our associates
