Embedded Micro-Scripts for Social-Emotional Learning and Stealth Assessment in Collaborative Educational Environments

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is essential for children’s participation in high-quality digital collaboration, yet open-ended environments often struggle to help children enact crucial SEL practices, such as turn-taking, negotiation, and conflict repair. This paper presents Cocity, a structured collaborative sandbox for children aged 7-10 that embeds SEL-oriented micro-scripts into a shared city-building activity. Rather than relying on post-gameplay reflection, Cocity integrates turn-taking checkpoints, negotiation cards, and voting procedures directly into moments of coordination and disagreement, while simultaneously capturing fine-grained interaction traces for process-based analysis. We conducted a three-week quasi-experimental study with 30 children, comparing Cocity against a baseline sandbox lacking SEL scaffolds. Using a mixed-methods approach of SEL questionnaires, system logs, and qualitative observations, we evaluated both short-term developmental outcomes and in-situ collaborative processes. Results provide converging evidence that Cocity is associated with greater pre-post gains in SEL scores, more balanced participation, efficient consensus-building, and fewer unresolved conflicts. Qualitative observations further reveal that these embedded mechanisms successfully guided social regulation without compromising children's creative agency. Ultimately, this work illustrates how abstract SEL frameworks can be translated into visible, actionable, and assessable system designs, contributing process-oriented strategies for next-generation collaborative learning technologies.