Our study considers children's perceptions of robots in terms of physical attributes, personality and emotion traits. To examine children's attitudes towards robots, a questionnaire approach was taken with a large sample of children, followed by a detailed statistical framework to analyse the data. Results show that children clearly distinguish between emotions and behaviour when judging robots. The distinguishing robotic physical characteristics for positive and negative emotions and behaviour are highlighted. Children judge human-like robots as aggressive, but human-machine robots as friendly providing support for the Uncanny Valley. The paper concludes with discussing the results in light of design implications for children's robots. 1 Introduction Robots have been used in a variety of service, educational or therapeutic applications, some projects focussing on the robot's functionalities, others on the social aspects, e.g. [I], [2], [ 3 ]. Increasingly, research addresses design implications for the desired end usergroup, be it adults, children, experts, or therapeutic client groups. Design specifications encompass a wide range of physical and behavioural features, as well as psychological aspects such as personality components and emotional expressions. 1.1 Design Considerations for Robots Robot Appearance: There is limited research that has directly considered the impact of the design of robot appearance on human-robot interaction cf. categorisations for understanding robot appearance proposed by Fong et al. [4]. Anthropomorphism is the tendency to attribute human characteristics to objects with a view of helping to understand and interpret their actions. It has been argued that for humans to have believable and meaningful interactions with robots then the robot should be structurally and functionally similar to a human, cf. [ 5 ] .

-This paper presents results from a study that explored children's attitudes of robots using a qualitative approach in the form of writing stories. This approach was chosen as complimentary to quantitative methods using questionnaires that were previously used to enquire about children's attitudes and perceptions towards both physical, emotional and personality aspects of robots. Results suggest that narrative can be a useful tool to elicit children's attitudes about robots, allowing them to explore their past experiences about bullying behaviour in a novel and safe context.

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