Robots and voice agents are increasingly used in therapy with children. However, little work to date has explored whether and how these tools might support holistic therapy approaches in group play-based settings, which introduce extra considerations compared to individual, task-oriented therapy contexts. In this paper, we describe three multi-week case studies in which an occupational therapist and two speech-language pathologists used a system consisting of a set of e-book stories and a teleoperated voice agent with neurodiverse groups of 5-8-year-old children in group play-based therapy settings. We interviewed therapists, focusing on how the system supported or could better support the social validity of the interventions in terms of goals, procedures, and outcomes. We contribute design implications for tools to support group play-based therapy contexts and explain how social validity can be applied to the evaluation of socially assistive technologies.

Advancements in automation technology and robotics present opportunities for young people to participate in the evolving roles and designs of libraries. Co-design processes often aim to build consensus, potentially obscuring controversies which are especially relevant when working with groups of participants with different temperaments and tendencies to find compromise. We conducted four sessions with seven 9-12-year-olds at a public library to co-design a robotic assistant librarian during which we attempted to spark agonism, or constructive disagreement. We conducted a thematic analysis of participants' negotiation during disagreements, perceptions of robots and librarians, and design choices. Agonism allowed participants to shift from an initial focus on minimizing harm to designing something playful. In this pictorial, we present a case study of an agonistic co-design process, the controversies and insights that surfaced about the role of robots in libraries, and ideas for encouraging playful participation in this type of co-design process.

To better support children's development of social skills through activities like face-to-face social roleplay, child-computer interaction researchers have employed a variety of strategies, with recent focus on tangible and embodied interactions. This article presents the results of a study conducted in South America focused on supporting face-to-face social roleplay for typically developing preschool children, examining the effect of adding and removing the digital layer of the tangible system. The results of the study provide insights into the challenges of supporting children moving to more complex forms of social roleplay, the diverse impact of adding and removing digital layers of tangible devices across children, and the ways in which what may appear as minor cultural differences can impact the deployment of a system to support social roleplay among preschool children.

Parents balance conflicting concerns and hopes with respect to children's technology use. While prior work documented many of these concerns and hopes, a better understanding of how parents prioritize these considerations with respect to one another could help design technologies for children that better address parents’ needs. We constructed a set of statements based on existing literature. 49 parents of 3-8-year-old children completed a Q-sort activity with these statements, from which we developed three parent personas with distinct attitudes toward technologies aimed at children. We contribute the item set, parent suggestions for additional items, three parent personas, and initial persona validation through a focus group study. We discuss how researchers could 1) use these personas to check for missing perspectives or as aids in participatory design work and 2) use the Q-sort method to create personas based on other populations and contexts.

As part of a larger initiative with the goal of developing ethical guidelines for conducting extended reality (XR) research with children, this paper presents the qualitative analysis of 24 sessions conducted with parents, teachers, medical professionals, and other adult stakeholders with a focus on young children and rural areas. The sessions included discussions of fears and hopes with respect to technologies and children based on prior literature, in-depth consideration of a broad range of potential use scenarios, explanations of how XR headsets work, and use of commercially available headsets. An inductive analysis of notes from sessions resulted in a data structure with the following aggregate dimensions: 1.) privacy and safety; 2.) managing content; 3.) developmental, physical, and behavioral impacts; 4.) broad concerns about emerging technologies; 5.) balancing XR and reality; and 6.) contextual considerations. We include details on each of these aggregate dimensions as well as a grounded model derived from them, providing examples of how these dimensions interact with each other to influence stakeholder perspectives on the ethics of specific uses of XR.

In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children's socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children's face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children's sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children's socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival's support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival's components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.

Child-agent interaction research has largely focused on automated voice agents, although privacy concerns and quality of interactions serve as a rationale for using teleoperated agents in some settings. Research on neurodivergent children's interactions with voice agents has largely focused on therapy and classroom contexts as opposed to home contexts. We conducted a remote case study via Zoom observing six families with neurodivergent children playing with a tangible, parent-operated voice agent at home for up to eight weeks. We used quantitative measures of agent utilization, qualitative analysis of video recordings, and parent survey responses to identify implications for teleoperation interface design for playful voice agents. Based on our analysis, we argue joint media engagement principles are applicable to a broader set of play activities, and teleoperated agents present affordances and challenges distinct from those of automated agents.

In a post-lockdown context with significant concerns about children's social skills, it is important for technologies to play a positive role in supporting children across cultures, settings, and backgrounds. The research presented in this work-in-progress is about StoryCarnival, a technology designed to promote creative, social role play among preschool children. We conducted StoryCarnival play sessions for three weeks with a group of 3-4-year-old children in Montevideo, Uruguay, a very different setting from the one where StoryCarnival was designed. We present preliminary results suggesting the activities resulted in a significant increase in children's social play. We also discuss the impact of cultural differences and describe experiences with some features of StoryCarnival that had not previously been used in the field.

Executive functions (EF), a set of cognitive processes necessary for goal-oriented behavior, are critical for children's school outcomes and often lacking when children arrive in elementary school. One of the most promising interventions to address this gap is Tools of the Mind (ToM), a Vygotskyan approach to early childhood education with a strong emphasis on sociodramatic play. One challenge in implementing this kind of play is supporting children in joining play with their peers. In this paper we present a content analysis of an eight-week evaluation comparing implementing ToM-style play with and without technology supports. We found that one specific aspect of the technology supports, a voice agent, played a crucial role in integrating shy children into sociodramatic play.

There has been a dramatic growth in interactive technology use by children under the age of 5 during the past decade. Despite this growth, children under the age of 5 typically participate only as users or testers in the design process in the overwhelming majority of projects targeting this population presented in key child-computer interaction venues. In this paper we introduce play-based design, an age-appropriate design method to give 3-4-year-old children a voice in the design process. More specifically, we contribute a thorough analysis of the use of existing methods to design technologies for children under the age of 5, a summary of the process that resulted in the development of play-based design, a detailed description of play-based design, a qualitative analysis of our experience implementing play-based design with two groups of children, and a discussion of play-based design's place among other methods, its advantages, and limitations.