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

TL;DR

This work investigates how a learning companion robot can augment parent-led in-home learning, introducing parent-robot collaboration (CAM: capability, availability, motivation) as a framework. Through a 10-dyad in-home study using Misty II during reading activities, the authors reveal how parents view robots as collaborators, delegate tasks, and balance educational objectives with concerns like privacy and content control. The findings yield design implications for adaptive interaction dynamics, mixed-initiative robot initiation, and parental governance to support flexible, family-centered in-home learning. Practically, the study provides a blueprint for integrating embodied robots into home learning by aligning robot capabilities with parental policies and situational needs while maintaining essential human-human interaction.

Abstract

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Our study materials included a social robot (Misty II), a warm-up booklet, two storybooks, and recording devices. Parent-child pairs read books at a table with the robot placed in front of them.
• Figure 2: The interaction features of the robot: (A) users scanned tags in the book to initiate prompts, and (B) they pressed the right-front bumper to repeat what the robot said and the left-front bumper to initiate a response to the current prompt.
• Figure 3: The interaction design for the reading activity. (1) The robot introduced itself to users and users used the warm-up booklet to learn and familiarize themselves with ways to interact with the robot. (2) Users selected a book to read. (3) Users initiated prompts from the robot when encountering a tag in the book during reading. (4) Users initiated a response to the current prompt from the robot by pressing the robot's left-front bumper.
• Figure 4: An overview of the results. We identified three main themes, including (1) parent-robot collaboration (parent/robot relative capability, parent availability, and parent motivation), (2) parent-guided factors (educational objectives and concerns about use of robot), and (3) robot-guided factors (interaction dynamic and interaction initiative).
• Figure 5: Summary of Theme 1: Parent-robot collaboration. We found that parents wanted to work with the robot as collaborators based on parent/robot relative capability (C), parents' availability (A), and parents' motivation (M).