  Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in
informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their
children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to
incorporate robots into their children's learning activities. We developed
prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational
prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and
conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3-5.
Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to
augment parental activities to foster children's learning, introducing the
notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical
understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in
informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a
companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots
might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting
policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms.
