Conversational Agents and Children: Let Children Learn
This addresses the problem of enhancing children's learning and safety in online environments, but it is a position paper with no empirical results, so it is incremental in proposing a design framework.
The paper argues for designing conversational agents that guide children in online information discovery to develop their technical and critical thinking skills, rather than simply finding resources for them.
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.