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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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This content will become publicly available on April 25, 2026
SET-PAiREd: Designing for Parental Involvement in Learning with an AI-Assisted Educational Robot
AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to support their children’s learning. We designed a card-based kit, SET, to systematically capture scenarios that have different extents of parental involvement. We developed a prototype interface, PAiREd, with a learning companion robot to deliver LLM-generated educational content that can be reviewed and revised by parents. Parents can flexibly adjust their involvement in the activity by determining what they want the robot to help with. We conducted an in-home field study involving 20 families with children aged 3–5. Our work contributes to an empirical understanding of the level of support parents with different expectations may need from AI and robots and a prototype that demonstrates an innovative interaction paradigm for flexibly including parents in supporting their children.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2202803
- PAR ID:
- 10655438
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 20
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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