Dance with me! : child-robot interaction in the wild

This paper presents the results of a singular experiment that has been conducted in a kindergarten in Japan. Four groups of ten children aged 3- to 5-year old interacted freely with the robot Pepper for about 20 min. In the first part of the experiment, the robot introduced itself to the children explaining a few basics. The children were then invited to touch the robot, to dance with it and finally to play with it freely while it was idle. Our experiment shows that regardless of the children’s age, they engage easily with the robot while it was talking and moving, however children of different ages have a different perception of the robot when it is idle. Younger children consider it more as a toy while older children are more likely to attribute a meaning to its idleness.