Playful interactions between parents and their young children are highly beneficial for the parent-child relationship and the child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. However, parents may struggle to initiate these interactions. To support them, we have developed In-Between, an app that takes brief input from the parent about their situation and uses generative AI to devise three suggestions to kick off a playful interaction: a story starter, a playful question, and a game idea. We share some reflections from initial conversations with parents and outline the research plan moving forwards.

Children’s lives are increasingly intertwined with AI systems, from recommender algorithms to generative models, raising concerns about potential impacts on children’s agency. Although supporting human agency, autonomy, and empowerment is a widely shared HCI goal, we lack clear definitions of these concepts in designing child-AI interaction. Through a review of 25 recent HCI studies, we find agency is rarely explicitly defined and its conceptualisation varies across something children innately possess and something to be developed. Our literature mapping shows that researchers observed agency through children’s planning and self-regulation, asserting control over AI systems, and critique and re-design of the status quo. Conditions reported by researchers that enable or constrain agency span epistemic conditions, interactional design, social context, and motivational orientation. Our review highlights gaps in research on designing for children’s agency. We advocate for conceptual clarity by drawing upon existing frameworks and highlight the importance of considering children’s agency through a relational lens.

Cuteness is a powerful aesthetic, and psychological research shows that cute things such as infants, baby animals, and toys capture and secure our attention, promote nurturing behaviour, and influence our preferences. Therefore, cuteness is a common design outcome in many consumer products, including robotics. However, we suggest that making cute zoomorphic robots may not be without its issues due to the complexities introduced by the analogies they make to various animals. We summarise the impact of cuteness in animals and robotics and analyse the intersection of the two domains by comparing the presence of baby schema features in different canine zoomorphic robots and dog breeds. Finally, we speculate on the benefits and drawbacks to cute zoomorphic robots, and provide suggestions for a new design approach that centres animals’ well-being. The aim of this work is to synthesise research on cuteness from different disciplines and prompt robot designers to be more conscious of cuteness and its potentially detrimental consequences in zoomorphic robots.

Zoomorphic robots are a promising substitute for live animals in situations where their involvement is impractical or impossible. One significant application is in animal welfare education, which plays a key role in shaping children’s relationships with animals and the natural world. In this work we present the evaluation of an educational intervention using a custom zoomorphic robot that communicates dog sentience and welfare needs to 10–11-year-old children (N = 104). The results show that the intervention as a whole is an effective animal welfare education intervention, as it succeeded in improving children’s belief in dog sentience, recognition of dog emotions, knowledge of dog welfare needs, and attachment to pets. While there was no significant effect of the zoomorphic robot over the same intervention delivered using a stuffed toy, children who interacted with the robot reported higher intrinsic motivation to participate in the intervention, suggesting potential future use as a proxy animal, particularly to sustain engagement in longer-term interventions.

Zoomorphic robots are a promising tool for animal welfare education and could be used to teach children that animals have minds and emotions and thereby reduce acceptance of cruelty towards animals. This study investigated the influence of animallike affective non-verbal behavior on children’s perceptions of the attributes and mental abilities of a zoomorphic robot, as well as their acceptance of cruelty towards it. Children who interacted with a robot that displayed animallike affective non-verbal behavior ascribed a significantly higher level of mental abilities. Higher levels of perceived mental abilities were not generally correlated with lower acceptance of cruelty but higher levels of perceived social attributes were. Post-hoc analysis of reasoning given for unacceptability of cruelty found that the group of children who made moral judgments about the cruelty had rated the zoomorphic robot as significantly more animate.