Turn-Taking, Children, and the Unpredictability of Fun

When the underlying assumptions of commonality of purpose and content break down, the interaction does as well. A great deal of the art of interaction design lies in minimizing what is, from the agent's point of view, out-of-task behavior, both by anticipating natural intask communication and by providing cues to lead participants down the predicted paths. Anticipation and cueing are particularly important in designing interactions for young children, a population that is limited in its ability to understand and adapt to the bounds of a system when things go awry. Most speech and natural language research that focuses on this population has pedagogy (Ogan et al. 2012; Gordon and Breazeal 2015) or therapy As explained briefly by Edith, there are two main game actions: effecting a change to the model by naming one of the clothing items or accessories on the board, and requesting a picture of the increasingly crazily clad model to be printed and taken home afterward. The majority of the interaction consists of 20 choice cycles during each of which a valid reference to a board item is made, the model changes, and a replacement item appears.