Shadows, Doodles and Dice: Three Demos for Inter-generational Interactions around AI Literacy

Dan Jackson Luís Carvalho William Imoukhuede Chris Jackson Xixiang Nie Maureen Mwadime Victoria Owen Allison Waxberg Matt (Wood) Tatwood

Shadows, Doodles and Dice: Three Demos for Inter-generational Interactions around AI Literacy.

AI in Learning & Education

• DOI

IDC ‘26: Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference

Winner: Best Demo Award IDC 2026.

We present three interactive demo installations: ShadowAI, Doodling with AI, and Story Dice. These were designed to promote critical AI literacy among children and families through playful, embodied, and collaborative experiences. ShadowAI invites participants to craft physical artefacts whose shadows are interpreted by a large language model to generate stories and images, to introduce a dialogue around the AI’s reasoning process. Doodling with AI adapts a drawing classification game across digital and physical media, highlighting differences between human and AI perception. Story Dice uses NFC-embedded physical dice to incrementally construct prompts for a local language model, demystifying prompt engineering through tangible storytelling. Collectively, these demos foreground children’s agency in understanding and shaping AI, positioning them as active participants rather than passive consumers. Exhibited at the Life Science Centre in Newcastle, the installations are designed for short, drop-in interactions that spark intergenerational dialogue around AI in an informal learning environment. The demos will be presented as interactive booth experiences, inviting conference attendees to engage hands-on with each installation.