Related papers: Conversational Agents and Children: Let Children L…
Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching…
Conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular for supporting and facilitating learning. Conventional pedagogical agents are designed to play the role of human teachers by giving instructions to the students. In this paper, we…
Research has shown that human-agent relationships form in similar ways to human-human relationships. Since children do not have the same critical analysis skills as adults (and may over-trust technology, for example), this…
Historically, researchers have focused on analyzing WEIRD, adult perspectives on technology. This means we may not have technology developed appropriately for children and those from non-WEIRD countries. In this paper, we analyze children…
Computational thinking, and by extension, computer programming, is notoriously challenging to learn. Conversational agents and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) have the potential to facilitate this learning process by offering…
With children talking to smart-speakers, smart-phones and even smart-microwaves daily, it is increasingly important to educate students on how these agents work-from underlying mechanisms to societal implications. Researchers are developing…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities of research on conversational agents with children and young people across four countries, exploring the ways AI technologies can support children's well-being across social and cultural…
Secondary school students enrolled in the AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course commonly utilize web resources (e.g., tutorials, Q\&A sites) to better understand key concepts in the curriculum. The primary obstacle to using these…
Question asking is an important tool for constructing academic knowledge, and a self-reinforcing driver of curiosity. However, research has found that question asking is infrequent in the classroom and children's questions are often…
The traditional process of building interactive machine learning systems can be viewed as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where the machine-learners are trained by one or more human-teachers. In this work, we explore the idea of…
We present our view of what is necessary to build an engaging open-domain conversational agent: covering the qualities of such an agent, the pieces of the puzzle that have been built so far, and the gaping holes we have not filled yet. We…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a…
Children in a large number of international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US learn and speak more than one language. However, parents often struggle to acquaint their young children with their local language if the child…
The desire and ability to seek new information strategically are fundamental to human learning but often overlooked in current language agent evaluation. We analyze a popular web shopping task designed to test language agents' ability to…
Conversational agents have been studied as tools to scaffold planning and self-reflection for productivity and well-being. While prior work has demonstrated positive outcomes, we still lack a clear understanding of what drives these results…
Research in developmental psychology consistently shows that children explore the world thoroughly and efficiently and that this exploration allows them to learn. In turn, this early learning supports more robust generalization and…
Conversational agents have become ubiquitous, ranging from goal-oriented systems for helping with reservations to chit-chat models found in modern virtual assistants. In this survey paper, we explore this fascinating field. We look at some…