Children's conversation with experience: making emotional imprints

We describe the design and use of a visual self-reporting technique that enables children to materialize their emotions. Inspired by an artistic practice, we investigate how this technique helps unfold and interpret the affective dimension of children's mediated activities, while fostering reflective conversations that may influence how they later re-engage in these activities. We first present the artistic process behind our self-reporting technique. We then describe a situated exploration of its use an elementary school classroom with 22 children (6--7 year olds), where a digital system was introduced to mediate learning activities. This exploration shows some of the benefits of eliciting children's perspectives on their mediated activities, and highlights the interplay between their perspectives and their activities. Finally, we discuss the value of our technique---and more broadly techniques that bring forward experiential qualities of materials to help reflect on experience---for conducting situated HCI and CCI research.