Conference Program

As artificial intelligence and digital technologies become increasingly embedded in everyday life, educators face the challenge of designing learning environments that support children’s critical and participatory engagement with these systems (Resnick, 2024). Artificial intelligence influences how knowledge is produced, while digital platforms shape social and cultural life, making such understanding fundamental for democratic participation in digitally mediated societies (Floridi, 2023). However, public debate often oscillates between fascination and fear, frequently portraying children as passive users at risk when interacting with technology (Gallese et al., 2025).

Grounded in a Reggio Emilia-inspired playful approach to learning, this contribution presents a pilot research project developed by Fondazione Reggio Children in collaboration with academic and technical partners. The project is the result of a multidisciplinary collaboration involving researchers, an atelierista, and an educator, whose complementary perspectives contributed to the design, facilitation, and interpretation of the learning experiences. The project emphasizes how children’s agency can be nurtured through inquiry-based and participatory experiences, exploring how learning environments can foster awareness of how AI systems operate, support democratic engagement, and develop critical thinking through playful learning.

The study adopts a qualitative methodology based on pedagogical documentation, reflective dialogues, observations, and final interviews. It developed through workshop-based activities involving children aged 7 to 12. The research explored how children engage with complex concepts through a discriminative AI tool and how this process supports reflection and dialogue on human and artificial intelligence.

Activities were designed to explore technological concepts through multiple expressive languages and embodied experiences, consistent with the Reggio Emilia emphasis on the “hundred languages”. Before interacting with AI systems, children and adults explored their knowledge about AI in order to construct new knowledge together, creating space for critical exploration. This was also an opportunity to deconstruct common societal narratives surrounding the relationship between children and digital technologies. The process of selecting datasets, engaging in trial and error, and recognizing that machines require human intervention to reduce errors, made visible the human work embedded in AI systems. Misunderstandings in interactions between humans and machines highlighted the subjective nature of interpretation and how understanding emerges through social exchanges.

The experience positioned AI not as a source of answers but as a tool to support questioning and metacognitive reflection. Children were encouraged to recognize how machines reflect human perceptions and intentions, while intergenerational exchanges among children, educators, researchers, and parents supported democratic knowledge construction.

Preliminary findings suggest that playful inquiry can foster critical reflection, enhance awareness of how AI operates, and support collaborative meaning-making. The research highlights how AI can become an educational opportunity when it supports, rather than directs, the learning process, preserving the centrality of the child as an active thinker and co-constructor of knowledge. This contribution proposes a pedagogical approach in which AI integration is conceived as a relational and reflective process, capable of fostering children’s agency and democratic participation in contemporary digital societies.