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

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.