Designing Conversational Robots with Children during the Pandemic

Abstract: Our research project (CHATTERS) is about designing a conversational robot for children's digital information search. We want to design a robot with a suitable conversation, that fosters a responsible trust relationship between child and robot. In this paper we give: 1) a preliminary view on an empirical study around children's trust in robots that provide information, which was conducted via video call due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 2) We also give a preliminary analysis of a co-design workshop we conducted, where the pandemic may have impacted children's design choices. (3) We close by describing the upcoming research activities we are developing.