Vicky Charisi

The increased presence of social robots geared toward children necessitate those who design and develop these technologies to understand and prepare for addressing emerging ethical and practical questions throughout phases of interaction design, technical development, and real-world use while maintaining a child-friendly and playful approach. Even more importantly, it is crucial to understand how we can address various tensions between the ethical and practical use of social robots with children, that may emerge between designers, developers, and users. In this full-day workshop, we will introduce the "playful by design" toolkit to promote hands-on and rights-based design experiences for researchers and practitioners to (1) identify and discuss tensions that arise in child-robot interaction research and (2) co-create a working-draft and collaboration plan for designing a "roboticist's guide to working with children". This workshop builds on the authors' past workshop and work-in-progress report at IDC 2025 where our key goal is to co-develop a community-driven resource through collecting and analyzing testimonials from child-robot interaction researchers.

This large-scale study assesses the impact of human oversight on countering discrimination in AI-aided decision-making for sensitive tasks. It follows a mixed method approach, including a quantitative experiment with Human Resources (HR) and banking professionals in Italy and Germany (N=1411), and qualitative analyses through interviews and workshops with participants and fair AI experts. The results show that human overseers were equally likely to follow advice from a fair AI as from a generic, discriminatory AI. Human oversight does not prevent discrimination by the generic AI. Fair AI reduces gender bias but not nationality bias. Participants’ choices are neither more nor less responsive to their preferences when using an AI or when left on their own. Interviews and workshops with participants highlight individual, organizational and societal biases. In case of conflict, participants prioritize their company’s interests over their own view of fairness. Participants also ask for better guidance on when to override AI recommendations. Fair AI experts stress the need for a comprehensive approach when designing oversight systems. Both technological and social aspects should be taken into consideration to ensure fairness.

Understanding what constitutes children’s well-being in digital environments is fundamental for designing technology that supports children’s development while minimizing emerging risks. This is even more urgent with the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the radical transformations in children’s everyday activities, play, and learning. With this workshop, we aim to co-create an agenda for future actions by mapping the current state-of-the-art research about children’s well-being, identifying policy initiatives and relevant stakeholders that come into play, and reflecting on existing good practices and proposing new ones for digital technology that promotes children’s well-being with a special focus on children from under-represented groups.

Ten questions to guide reflection and assessment of the “good” in robotics projects are suggested.