Conversational Agents and Children: Let Children Learn

Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can – non-intrusively – guide children in their quest for online resources rather than simply finding resources for them. We argue that agents should “let children learn” and should be built to take on a teacher-facilitator function, allowing children to develop their technical and critical thinking abilities as they interact with varied technology in a broad range of use cases.