An Interactive, Unplugged Activity to Engage Children in Designing

Solutions for Smart Villages

Ilenia Fronza

1 a

, Aziya Mehboob

1 b

, Gennaro Iaccarino

2 c

and Giovanni Pernigotto

1 d

Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Italy

Direzione Istruzione e Formazione Italiana, Bolzano, Italy

Keywords:

Interactive Activity, Smart Village, Smart Home, Coding, Parsons Problem.

Abstract:

Smart villages require the involvement of residents. However, past experiences have revealed that goals were

often not achieved because the community was treated as a single entity. In particular, the literature high-

lights the importance of improving smart services and outcomes to meet the needs of children, who are often

excluded from participatory initiatives and rarely recognized as stakeholders. Non-conventional learning en-

vironments, like science festivals, provide an excellent opportunity to raise awareness and engage children

as stakeholders in smart villages. However, organizing these events can be challenging due to the diverse

backgrounds and varying needs of participants. Moreover, organizers often lack familiarity with individuals’

learning styles and requirements. This study presents an interactive, unplugged activity aimed at children aged

6 to 10, where they can devise solutions for smart villages while learning fundamental programming concepts.

To illustrate the potential of this activity, we present the results of its initial implementation with approxi-

mately 100 participants during a science festival. The ﬁrst results show that the proposed activity is effective,

engaging, and inclusive, making it an effective method for managing large and diverse groups of participants

at science festivals.

1 INTRODUCTION

Smart villages aim to implement the concept of smart

cities in rural areas, drawing from research on smart

cities (Dassori et al., 2019; Visvizi and Lytras, 2018).

Just as citizens are integral to smart cities (Hennig,

2014), local participation is crucial for smart villages

(Juan and Mceldowney, 2021). However, the experi-

ence of smart cities has revealed that goals were of-

ten unmet due to the oversight of the speciﬁc needs

of their residents (Dameri, 2014). Furthermore, par-

ticipatory planning processes have been criticized for

considering an “average citizen” (Montalvan Castilla

and Riel M

uller, 2024). For instance, despite being

beneﬁciaries, users, and data subjects (Sun, 2023),

children have rarely been considered stakeholders

(Montalvan Castilla and Riel M

uller, 2024). They

are often seen as passive users (Geeng and Roesner,

2019), and technologies are not designed with chil-

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0224-2452

https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4377-9362

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7776-7379

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1027-7199

dren in mind (Sun, 2023).

Non-conventional learning experiences, like sci-

ence festivals, provide excellent opportunities to raise

awareness and involve children in expressing their

preferences for features they would like to see in

smart villages. Diversity and heterogeneity are key

factors of these initiatives (Fronza and Pahl, 2019)

as they attract large and diverse groups of partici-

pants with different needs and backgrounds. There-

fore, unlike in a traditional classroom setting, instruc-

tors typically do not know each participant’s learning

style and needs. This makes it difﬁcult to facilitate

these events, and there is a risk that participants may

struggle to keep up with the pace of the activities and

be dissatisﬁed with their outcomes (Fronza and Pahl,

2019). For this reason, inclusive educational mate-

rial is needed for this particular setting. According to

the cognitive load theory (Sweller, 1988), the mate-

rial should be designed to reduce the extraneous load,

which is caused by the complexity of the instructional

materials, and focus on the germane load, which is

devoted to the processing, construction, and automa-

tion of schemes in long-term memory (Ericson et al.,

2018) to allow for the construction of schemes.

526

Fronza, I., Mehboob, A., Iaccarino, G. and Pernigotto, G.

An Interactive, Unplugged Activity to Engage Children in Designing Solutions for Smart Villages.

DOI: 10.5220/0013265400003932

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2025) - Volume 2, pages 526-533

ISBN: 978-989-758-746-7; ISSN: 2184-5026

Picking up from that need, in this paper, we

present an interactive, unplugged activity to engage

children aged 6 to 10 in designing solutions for smart

villages, with a speciﬁc focus on smart homes. To fos-

ter algorithmic thinking education from an early age

(Fronza et al., 2014; Djurdjevic-Pahl et al., 2017), the

activity incorporates fundamental programming con-

cepts to assist in managing various conditions within

a smart home. To illustrate the potential of our ap-

proach, we present the results of its ﬁrst implemen-

tation by summarizing them to analyze two relevant

aspects:

1. Understand whether the proposed interactive, un-

plugged activity succeeds in involving children in

designing solutions for smart homes.

2. Outline the effectiveness of the proposed interac-

tive, unplugged activity for science festivals tar-

geting younger children.

According to the results of the initial implementa-

tion, our approach was successful and allowed us to

manage large and diverse groups of participants in-

clusively. At the end of the activity, the participants

demonstrated their understanding of the if-then-else

construct and effectively acted as stakeholders by ex-

pressing their desired features for smart homes.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-

tion 2 provides background information and related

work. Section 3 describes the proposed interactive

activity. Section 4 describes the ﬁrst evaluation of

the proposed activity and Section 5 reports its results.

Section 6 concludes this work.

2 BACKGROUND INFORMATION

AND RELATED WORK

Smart villages face the typical issues of rural areas

(Zavratnik et al., 2020), such as limited access to

essential services like healthcare and education, low

digital literacy, and fewer job opportunities (Johnson

and Lichter, 2019; Cunha et al., 2020; Anastasiou

et al., 2021; Rodr

ıguez-Soler et al., 2020). Moreover,

the rapid adoption of new technologies tends to oc-

cur in urban areas, further widening the digital divide

(Stojanova et al., 2021).

Smart homes consist of interconnected sensors,

interfaces, devices, and appliances, enabling automa-

tion and local or remote control of lighting, ventila-

tion, heating, energy usage, and security (Paetz et al.,

2012). These homes collect contextual data about the

environment and their residents to offer customized

support and user-friendly interfaces, prioritizing the

user’s perspective (Singh et al., 2014). However,

smart homes are often designed by considering chil-

dren as passive users (Geeng and Roesner, 2019; Sun,

2023).

To address this issue, it is necessary to involve

children more in designing solutions for smart homes

by considering them as equal stakeholders and valu-

ing their input as experts in their own lives (Hansen,

2017). For instance, Sheriff et al. developed a me-

chanical tool for children that encourages systematic

exploration of mechanical concepts, initiative, proce-

dural thinking, and positive risk-taking in a home en-

vironment (Sheriff et al., 2017). Another study pro-

posed a user interface designed for children to help

them describe tasks related to end-user development

in smart homes. An experiment involving 32 par-

ticipants aged 8 to 12 was conducted in a simulated

classroom designed to resemble a smart home to eval-

uate the effectiveness of this user interface (Kakavand

et al., 2023). Berrezueta-Guzman et al. developed

a smart home environment designed to assist chil-

dren with their daily tasks (Berrezueta-Guzman et al.,

2020). This environment incorporates intelligent ob-

jects, such as study chairs and desks, which mon-

itor children’s behavior during homework and pro-

vide real-time supervision and guidance. In inter-

views with 17 children aged 9 to 12, it was found

that they strongly associated smart home technologies

with practical needs, such as cleaning their rooms or

turning on lights (Erel et al., 2020).

The effort to engage children in the co-design of

urban environments has largely focused on the con-

text of smart cities. Gomes et al. introduced the

Smart City Kids Lab project aimed at encouraging

children to explore and learn programming (Gomes

et al., 2019). Simonofski et al. developed a participa-

tory design workshop aimed at enhancing children’s

understanding of the smart city concepts (Simonofski

et al., 2019). This workshop comprised three parts:

a theoretical introduction, the creation of a smart city

model, and the identiﬁcation and resolution of urban

challenges within that model. The smart city model

developed during the second part of the workshop re-

lied on paper, which made it difﬁcult for the children

to engage in meaningful discussions. To address this

issue, Clarinval et al. proposed a collaborative, tan-

gible interface (Clarinval et al., 2021). Their updated

city model featured an interactive table that displayed

a blank city map. In 2023, Clarinval et al. proposed

a workshop aimed at educating children aged 12-14

about smart city concepts. The workshop involved

participants in exercises related to urban planning and

aimed to develop a method for citizen participation.

However, one limitation of the workshop was that the

children completed the post-test several days or weeks

later (Clarinval et al., 2023).

An Interactive, Unplugged Activity to Engage Children in Designing Solutions for Smart Villages

527

Figure 1: Structure of the activity. All the images representing the stages are AI-generated.

3 THE INTERACTIVE,

UNPLUGGED ACTIVITY

The proposed activity engages children in designing

solutions for smart homes. As shown in Figure 1, it

consists of two phases detailed in this section.

3.1 First Phase: Programming Activity

In this phase, children are introduced to the concept

of smart homes through an unplugged programming

activity. While completing this phase, children learn

the basic programming construct for managing differ-

ent conditions in smart homes, speciﬁcally the if-then-

else construct.

Table 1 summarizes the ﬁve stages of the un-

plugged programming activity. Each stage corre-

sponds to a situation that can occur in a smart home.

Each situation is illustrated in an image to help chil-

dren understand them more easily. In each stage, chil-

dren are required to write instructions for program-

ming the smart home using the if-then-else construct.

Children must complete one stage before moving on

to the next.

To program the smart home according to the given

situation in each stage, children solve Parsons prob-

lems by correctly rearranging the solution’s lines of

code presented in a scrambled order as colored tiles

(Ericson et al., 2022). The main characteristics of

Parsons problems are implemented in each stage as

detailed in Table 2.

The Parsons problems present increasing chal-

lenges across the ﬁve stages. For example, in the sec-

ond stage, the secondary execution path is introduced

when the if clause evaluates to false. From the third

stage onward, distractors are added, ﬁrst one and then

two, which increases the number of tiles to consider

while writing an instruction.

The choice to incorporate Parsons problems orig-

inates from our objective to create an interactive

and inclusive learning activity suitable for non-

conventional educational settings. Speciﬁcally, we

use adaptive Parsons problems to improve teaching

and support learning (Ericson et al., 2018; Hou et al.,

2022; Prather et al., 2023; Wu and Ericson, 2024) of

students with special educational needs or cognitive

impairments (Haynes, 2020; Haynes-Magyar, 2024).

We utilized two distinct approaches for imple-

menting adaptation in Parsons problems. Intra-

problem adaptation is obtained by having the instruc-

tor dynamically make the problem easier if the learner

is struggling to solve the problem. Inter-problem

adaptation is obtained by having the instructor mod-

ify the next stage based on the learner’s performance

on the previous one (e.g., by skipping one stage). Be-

ing an unplugged programming activity, the instructor

provides immediate line-based feedback on the solu-

tion (Ericson et al., 2022) and answers to potential

questions.

Children progress through the ﬁve stages at their

own pace and can seek support from the instructor

whenever needed.

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Table 1: The ﬁve stages of the interactive activity. Each stage corresponds to different situations that can occur in a smart

home.

Stage Fragments Solution Characteristics

1. Nobody is at home

There is no secondary path

of execution when the “if”

clause evaluates to false.

There are no distractors.

2. It is dark in the house

There is a secondary path

of execution when the “if”

clause evaluates to false.

There are no distractors.

3. There is a smell in the house

There is a secondary path

of execution when the “if”

clause evaluates to false.

There is one distractor.

4. It is winter and it is cold at home

There is a secondary path

of execution when the “if”

clause evaluates to false.

There are two distractors

(easily identiﬁable).

5. It is summer and it is hot at home

There is a secondary path

of execution when the “if”

clause evaluates to false.

There are two distractors

(more difﬁcult to identify

respect to the previous

stage).

All the images representing the stages are AI-generated.

3.2 Second Phase: Becoming

Stakeholders

In the second phase, children take on the role of stake-

holders and share their opinions on the features they

want to see in a smart home. To this end, they are

encouraged to answer the question: In your opinion,

what should a smart home do? by using a card that

reﬂects the structure of the ﬁve stages they have com-

pleted in the ﬁrst phase of the activity.

As shown in Figure 1, the card has three blocks

labeled if, then, and else, and three empty blocks to

be completed with a condition, the action to be per-

formed if the condition is true, and the action to be

performed otherwise.

4 FIRST IMPLEMENTATION

To illustrate the potential of the proposed activity, we

implemented it at a public science festival in Bolzano,

Italy. This festival is a free-to-attend family science

day featuring talks, demonstrations, exhibitions, and

interactive experiences on Science, Technology, Engi-

An Interactive, Unplugged Activity to Engage Children in Designing Solutions for Smart Villages

529

Table 2: Characteristics of Parsons problem (as listed in (Ericson et al., 2022)) in the proposed activity.

Characteristic Motivation

Atomicity A limited number of fragments is provided. Fragments are elements of

a line.

Problem Space The number of available fragments is limited and reuse is not allowed.

Distractors are introduced in the more advanced stages.

Constructing a Solution Each stage begins with an empty solution space into which the frag-

ments are positioned in order.

Correctness and Feedback The instructor provides immediate line-based feedback on the solution.

Modality and User Interface A drag-and-drop environment is simulated: fragments are written on

colored tiles. Yellow tiles contain the if-then-else construct.

Syntax Fragments are written in natural language.

Scaffolding Children can ask for the instructor’s help.

Fit and Expected Time on Task The presented problems are appropriate to children aged 6 to 10. Solv-

ing a problem requires 2-3 minutes.

neering, Art, and Math (STEAM) to encourage young

people to pursue science education (Canovan, 2019;

DeWitt et al., 2016). The festival provides an appro-

priate context for our interactive activity as it attracts

a broad, non-expert, curious, and motivated to learn

population. The festival involved around 2000 partic-

ipants of all ages.

The proposed activity took place in a room with

free entrance and no reservation required. Three

workstations were set up on a large table, each with a

chair, and three instructors (i.e., authors of this paper)

were ready to welcome the participants (Figure 2).

Children could approach the table spontaneously or

be kindly invited by the instructors. They could leave

at any point without completing all the activities. The

booth was open for 8 hours and hosted approximately

one hundred children (6-10 years old). The instruc-

tors collected semi-structured observations and the

cards completed by children in the second phase.

Figure 2: Picture taken during the ﬁrst implementation of

the activity at the science festival.

5 RESULTS

In this section, we summarize the results of the ﬁrst

implementation of the proposed activity to analyze

two relevant aspects.

1. Understand Whether the Proposed Unplugged,

Interactive Activity Succeeds in Involving Children

in Designing Solutions for Smart Homes.

Around 100 children participated in the ﬁrst phase

of the proposed activity, with a good balance of gen-

ders. Some children only completed part of the ini-

tial phase, mainly because they preferred to explore

more booths at the science festival rather than spend-

ing too much time on a single activity. During this

time, younger and absolute beginners typically com-

pleted two or three stages, while older and more ex-

perienced participants managed to complete all stages

in around 15 minutes.

Overall, most children were eager to complete

the stages before moving to the next booth and

showed enthusiasm when demonstrating their solu-

tions. Around 60 children completed the ﬁrst phase.

Some asked the facilitators for additional details and

imagined other scenarios involving smart homes.

The observations collected during the implemen-

tation of the ﬁrst phase are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3: First phase of the activity: results of the ﬁrst im-

plementation.

Observation Result

Number of participants ∼ 100

Min. time spent on the activity 10 min.

Min. number of stages completed 2

Max. time spent to complete all the stages 15 min.

Number of participants who completed all

the stages

CSEDU 2025 - 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

530

Out of the children who completed the ﬁrst phase

of the activity, only 18 went on to ﬁnish the second

phase, in which they expressed their wishes for a fea-

ture in a smart home. The other children chose instead

to engage in various other activities offered at the sci-

ence festival.

The analysis of the completed cards reveals that

all the children understood the fundamentals of the if-

then-else construct, as they demonstrated their ability

to input in the card a condition, the action to be ex-

ecuted if the condition is true, and the action to be

executed otherwise.

Most of the 18 respondents understood the smart

home’s basic concept. Only three children men-

tioned a condition related to themselves rather than

the house (for example, “if I am sleeping”) and one

also mentioned actions unrelated to the house (“if

I am bored, then I jump, else I draw”). Conﬁrm-

ing the previous literature in the ﬁeld (Erel et al.,

2020), children have shown a strong association be-

tween smart home technologies and practical needs.

Among their desired features for smart homes, they

listed the possibility of controlling shutters/windows,

lights, cleaning, heating/air conditioning, and protect-

ing from thieves/ﬁres.

Table 4: Second phase of the activity: results of the ﬁrst

implementation.

Observation Result

Number of participants 18

Number of children who understood the fun-

damentals of the if-then-else construct

Number of children who understood the

smart home’s basic concept

Overall, according to the observations collected in

the ﬁrst implementation, the proposed activity results

as a successful means to inclusively involving chil-

dren to whatever extent they chose to participate.

2. Outline the Effectiveness of the Proposed Un-

plugged, Interactive Activity for Science Festivals

Targeting Younger Children.

The proposed activity was successful, engaging

approximately 100 children of different genders in

the target age of 6 to 10 years old, during the sci-

ence festival. Additionally, the activity provided an

additional opportunity to raise awareness about smart

homes: while the children were busy with the activ-

ity, accompanying adults watched a video on smart

homes that was projected near the activity table. Af-

terward, many adults approached the facilitators, who

are experts in the ﬁeld, to ask questions regarding

smart homes and their controls.

The activity was inclusive, allowing all children

to participate to some degree. We did not observe

any cases of children immediately abandoning the ac-

tivity. Moreover, all the children completed some

stages of the ﬁrst phase of the activity, with more

experienced or faster participants implementing all

the stages and even imagining additional situations in

smart homes. Therefore, the Parsons problem struc-

ture has proven essential in involving everyone, at

least in the initial and most straightforward part.

Most children had unconsciously decided to spend

a maximum of 10 minutes on the activity. After this

time, they preferred to move on and visit other festival

booths. Only 18 children chose to continue to the sec-

ond phase, which likely needed to be more engaging

and playful to retain children’s attention at the booth.

After ﬁnishing the ﬁrst phase, many children believed

they were done and opted to spend their time at other

booths instead.

These results suggest that this activity is effective

for science festivals focused on younger children, as

it not only captures their interest but also promotes

inclusivity.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this work, we presented an interactive, unplugged

activity aimed at engaging children aged 6 to 10 in

designing solutions for smart villages, with a speciﬁc

focus on smart homes. The activity also incorporates

basic programming concepts to help manage various

conditions within a smart home. To illustrate the po-

tential of our approach, we presented the results of

its ﬁrst implementation involving around 100 partici-

pants during a science festival.

The results from its ﬁrst implementation show that

the proposed activity is both engaging and inclusive.

This makes it an effective method for managing large

and diverse groups of participants, particularly at sci-

ence festivals aimed at younger children. Moreover,

the children who completed both the phases of the ac-

tivity demonstrated their understanding of the if-then-

else construct and successfully acted as stakeholders

by expressing their desired features for smart homes.

Some limitations could impact the results of this

work. For example, we have noticed that, consis-

tent with previous literature in the ﬁeld (Erel et al.,

2020), children associated smart home technologies

with practical needs. However, this may be inﬂuenced

by the speciﬁc contexts presented in the ﬁrst phase

of the activity. Furthermore, conducting the study in

an uncontrolled environment means we lack detailed

information regarding participants’ programming and

smart home skills, which prevents us from conﬁdently

An Interactive, Unplugged Activity to Engage Children in Designing Solutions for Smart Villages

531

asserting that the activity contributes to developing

these skills.

Replications are necessary to draw more robust

conclusions, such as by conducting the activity in dif-

ferent non-traditional learning environments. Addi-

tionally, we need replications in more controlled set-

tings to account for speciﬁc factors, including the

presence of special educational needs. This level of

control is not possible at events like science festivals,

where we can only assume that participants have di-

verse learning needs.

Future work may consider transitioning from an

unplugged version of the proposed activity to a more

interactive digital tool, which could increase the adap-

tation of the Parsons problems in the ﬁrst phase.

Moreover, the second phase could address the issues

identiﬁed in this work, speciﬁcally becoming more

engaging. For example, children may suggest fea-

tures they would like in smart homes by modifying

a smart home simulation incorporated into the tool.

Furthermore, the tool could use artiﬁcial intelligence

to generate personalized and adaptive Parsons prob-

lems (del Carpio Gutierrez et al., 2024) rather than

just learning to solve them (Hou et al., 2024), tailor-

ing them to each child’s cognitive needs. Finally, to

better prepare the population for smart villages, the

approach presented in this paper could be expanded

to other disciplines beyond computer science, includ-

ing non-technical ﬁelds.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was funded by the European Union -

NextGenerationEU, in the framework of the consor-

tium iNEST - Interconnected Nord-Est Innovation

Ecosystem (PNRR, Missione 4 Componente 2, Inves-

timento 1.5 D.D. 1058 23/06/2022, ECS 00000043 –

Spoke1, RT1A, CUP I43C22000250006). The views

and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors

and do not necessarily reﬂect those of the European

Union, nor can the European Union be held responsi-

ble for them.

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