2nd Workshop on Evaluating Child-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Many researchers have started to explore natural interaction scenarios for children. No matter if these children are normally developing or have special needs, evaluating Child- Robot Interaction (CRI) is a challenge. To find methods that work well and provide reliable data is difficult, for example because commonly used methods such as questionnaires do not work well particularly with younger children. Previous research has shown that children need support in expressing how they feel about technology. Given this, researchers often choose time-consuming behavioral measures from observations to evaluate CRI. However, these are not necessarily comparable between studies and robots. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to share their experiences on these aspects. The main topics are methods to evaluate child-robot interaction design, methods to evaluate socially assistive child-robot interaction and multi-modal evaluation of child-robot interaction. Connected questions that we would like to tackle are for example: i) What are reliable metrics in CRI? ii) How can we overcome the pitfalls of survey methods in CRI? iii) How can we integrate qualitative approaches in CRI? iv) What are the best practices for in the wild studies with children? Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we want to discuss advantages and shortcomings of using different evaluation methods in order to compile guidelines for future CRI research. This workshop is the second in a series that started at the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2015.