This week, I had the pleasure of presenting our Work in Progress paper, “Design Heuristics for GenAI Educational Platforms,” at the ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference in Reykjavík, Iceland. I’m presenting on behalf of my co-authors, Seren Parkman, Joseph Lindley, and Elisa Rubegni, and it’s been a truly collaborative experience.
The paper shares findings from the initial stage of a new project building on the success of Ryelands AI Lab, aiming to design and produce a Generative AI learning platform for primary education settings. We spoke to educators and synthesised these conversations into four design heuristics for developing GenAI learning tools. The full paper will be available shortly.
IDC has been a fantastic experience so far. I had the chance to present our paper both as a lightning talk and a poster, which I think is such a powerful format. The art of distilling a full paper into a few compelling sentences encourages attendees to visit your poster, while also helping poster authors connect with other researchers despite time constraints. The diversity of presentations this year has been amazing, and I’ve come away with a “library” of papers I want to read, along with new ideas and potential future collaborations. And yes — I even bought stickers!
This is my first IDC, and I’m loving the mix of research, play, and creativity. There’s definitely a direct correlation between the amount of knitting I do and how much I enjoy a presentation — someone needs to graph that! I’m also really appreciating the architecture of the universities here, and despite my crippling fear of whales, I’m looking forward to the conference dinner at the Iceland Whale exhibit later.
Before the conference, I spent the week travelling along the southern coast of Iceland, from Keflavík east to Höfn, and then back to Reykjavík. Along the way, I left a trail of heuristics, which felt like a playful prelude to sharing them formally at the conference.
Overall, I’m exhausted in the best way — full of ideas, inspiration, and energy from connecting with such a vibrant community. If you’re attending IDC, make sure to check out the poster sessions and lightning talks — there’s so much excellent work to explore. This won’t be my last IDC for sure!
