Roboticist’s guide to working with children: a playful by design workshop

Abstract

The increased presence of social robots geared toward children necessitate those who design and develop these technologies to understand and prepare for addressing emerging ethical and practical questions throughout phases of interaction design, technical development, and real-world use while maintaining a child-friendly and playful approach. Even more importantly, it is crucial to understand how we can address various tensions between the ethical and practical use of social robots with children, that may emerge between designers, developers, and users. In this full-day workshop, we will introduce the "playful by design" toolkit to promote hands-on and rights-based design experiences for researchers and practitioners to (1) identify and discuss tensions that arise in child-robot interaction research and (2) co-create a working-draft and collaboration plan for designing a "roboticist's guide to working with children". This workshop builds on the authors' past workshop and work-in-progress report at IDC 2025 where our key goal is to co-develop a community-driven resource through collecting and analyzing testimonials from child-robot interaction researchers.