“It’ll cheer you on!” Children with and without reading difficulty value robot reading companions that are smart, supportive, and personal

As social robots are being increasingly deployed in educational settings, it is critically important to understand which design features make robots most likely to be accepted by children and to deliver benefits in education contexts. To deepen our understanding of young readers’ expectations, needs, and desires for a robot that supports reading, we conducted co-design sessions followed by a semi-structured interview with children aged 5-9 years (30 typical readers and a case series of 5 children with poor reading, with 4 engaged in targeted reading intervention at the time the study was conducted). We conducted a thematic analysis of interview data using a reflexive and inductive approach. We found that children designed robots that could deliver reading-specific support alongside more general emotional support. Key functional features and capabilities included prosocial behaviours (smiling, play, conversation), breadth of knowledge that assumed access to information about many topics, including core academic skills (reading, mathematics). Key aesthetic features included colourful, compact, and customisable designs. These findings have implications for the design and implementation of social robots to support reading and suggest that children are very much open to interacting with reading robot companions.