Beyond ‘What’s This?’: Designing Conversational Agents to Support Children's Inquiry and Engagement in Exhibits
Sohyun Park, Won‐Young Lee, Sangjun Lee, Woohun Lee · 2025
Figure 1: An illustration showcasing the typical dialogue patterns between the child and the agent across the three conditions of HelloCuriosity, a system designed to investigate how agents support children's inquiry in exhibits AbstractCompetent responders to children's questions foster high-quality inquiry.While conversational agents (CAs) have been explored in various roles to support questioning, little research has examined how different agent responses shape inquiry.Children engage in exhibits not only with agents but also with surrounding objects, requiring CAs to support both inquiry and behavioral engagement-an aspect that remains underexplored.We conducted a comparative user study (N=36, ages 6-12) examining three agent types modeled after insights from our formative study: a reactive responder, a facilitative responder, and an active peer.Findings