Child-robot interaction: playing alone or together?

In this paper we propose a new method to evaluate child-robot interaction, by asking whether playing a game with a state-of-the-art social robot is more similar to playing this game alone or with a friend. Subjective fun scores suggest that children have more fun playing with the robot than playing alone, but have more fun still when playing with a friend. A perception test of selected fragments indicates that children are more expressive when playing with the robot than they are when playing alone, but less expressive than when playing with a friend. Taken together these results show that playing a game together with a state-of-the-art social robot is more fun than playing alone, and approaches playing with a friend, although more work needs to be done to achieve the latter level.