Age-Appropriate Robot Design: In-The-Wild Child-Robot Interaction Studies of Perseverance Styles and Robot's Unexpected Behavior

As child-robot interactions become more and more common in daily life environment, it is important to examine how robot's errors influence children's behavior. We explored how a robot's unexpected behaviors affect child-robot interactions during two workshops on active reading: one in a modern art museum and one in a school. We observed the behavior and attitudes of 42 children from three age groups: 6-7 years, 8-10 years, and 10-12 years. Through our observations, we identified six different types of surprising robot behaviors: personality, movement malfunctions, inconsistent behavior, mispronunciation, delays, and freezing. Using a qualitative analysis, we examined how children responded to each type of behavior, and we observed similarities and differences between the age groups. Based on our findings, we propose guidelines for designing age-appropriate learning interactions with social robots.