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1. Child-Robot Interaction to Integrate Reflective Storytelling Into Creative Play

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3450741.3465254  

   Hubbard, Layne Jackson; Chen, Yifan; Colunga, Eliana; Kim, Pilyoung; Yeh, Tom (June 2021, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Creativity and Cognition)

   When young children create, they are exploring their emerging skills. And when young children reflect, they are transforming their learning experiences. Yet early childhood play environments often lack toys and tools to scaffold reflection. In this work, we design a stuffed animal robot to converse with young children and prompt creative reflection through open-ended storytelling. We also contribute six design goals for child-robot interaction design. In a hybrid Wizard of Oz study, 33 children ages 4-5 years old across 10 U.S. states engaged in creative play then conversed with a stuffed animal robot to tell a story about their creation. By analyzing children’s story transcripts, we discover four approaches that young children use when responding to the robot’s reflective prompting: Imaginative, Narrative Recall, Process-Oriented, and Descriptive Labeling. Across these approaches, we find that open-ended child-robot interaction can integrate personally meaningful reflective storytelling into diverse creative play practices. 

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2. Teaching and learning with children: Impact of reciprocal peer learning with a social robot on children's learning and emotive engagement

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.103836  

   Chen, H.; Park, HW.; Breazeal, C. (January 2020, Computers education)

   Pedagogical agents are typically designed to take on a single role: either as a tutor who guides and instructs the student, or as a tutee that learns from the student to reinforce what he/she knows. While both agent-role paradigms have been shown to promote student learning, we hypothesize that there will be heightened benefit with respect to students’ learning and emotional engagement if the agent engages children in a more peer-like way — adaptively switching between tutor/tutee roles. In this work, we present a novel active role-switching (ARS) policy trained using reinforcement learning, in which the agent is rewarded for adapting its tutor or tutee behavior to the child’s knowledge mastery level. To investigate how the three different child–agent interaction paradigms (tutee, tutor, and peer agents) impact children’s learning and affective engagement, we designed a randomized controlled between-subject experiment. Fifty-nine children aged 5–7 years old from a local public school participated in a collaborative word-learning activity with one of the three agent-role paradigms. Our analysis revealed that children’s vocabulary acquisition benefited from the robot tutor’s instruction and knowledge demonstration, whereas children exhibited slightly greater affect on their faces when the robot behaves as a tutee of the child. This synergistic effect between tutor and tutee roles suggests why our adaptive peer-like agent brought the most benefit to children’s vocabulary learning and affective engagement, as compared to an agent that interacts only as a tutor or tutee for the child. This work sheds light on how fixed role (tutor/tutee) and adaptive role (peer) agents support children’s cognitive and emotional needs as they play and learn. It also contributes to an important new dimension of designing educational agents — actively adapting roles based on the student’s engagement and learning needs. 

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3. Investigating the Effects of Self-Avatars and Story-Relevant Avatars on Children's Creative Storytelling

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376331  

   Zarei, Niloofar; Chu, Sharon Lynn; Quek, Francis; Rao, Nanjie 'Jimmy'; Brown, Sarah Anne (April 2020, International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   Storytelling is a critical step in the cognitive development of children. Particularly, this requires children to mentally project into the story context and to identify with the thoughts of the characters in their stories. We propose to support free imagination in creative storytelling through an enactment- based approach that allows children to embody an avatar and perform as the story character. We designed our story creation interface with two modes of avatar: the story-relevant avatar and the self-avatar, to investigate the effects of avatar design on the quality of children’s creative products. In our study with 20 child participants, the results indicate that self-avatars can create a stronger sense of identification and embodied presence, while story-relevant avatars can provide a scaffold for mental projection. 

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4. The Unboxing Experience: Exploration and Design of Initial Interactions Between Children and Social Robots

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501955  

   Lee, Christine P; Cagiltay, Bengisu; Mutlu, Bilge (April 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22))

   Social robots are increasingly introduced into children’s lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the “unboxing” phenomenon in media suggests that introduction is key to technology adoption where initial impressions are made. To better understand this phenomenon toward designing a positive unboxing experience in the context of social robots for children, we conducted three field studies with families of children aged 8 to 13: (1) an exploratory free-play activity (n = 12); (2) a co-design session (n = 11) that informed the development of a prototype box and a curated unboxing experience; and (3) a user study (n = 9) that evaluated children’s experiences. Our findings suggest the unboxing experience of social robots can be improved through the design of a creative aesthetic experience that engages the child socially to guide initial interactions and foster a positive child-robot relationship. 

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5. "It's Not a Replacement:" Enabling Parent-Robot Collaboration to Support In-Home Learning Experiences of Young Children

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642806  

   Ho, Hui-Ru; Hubbard, Edward M; Mutlu, Bilge (May 2024, ACM)

   Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children’s learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children’s learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3–5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children’s learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms. 

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