Beyond ‘What’s This?’: Designing Conversational Agents to Support Children's Inquiry and Engagement in Exhibits

Competent 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 indicate that an agent’s level of initiative influences the breadth of children’s inquiry, while depth is shaped more by the participation structure than by the agent’s responses. For behavioral engagement, the content of the agent’s responses played a key role in directing children's attention to the exhibit. We propose design implications for CAs that foster children's inquiry and engagement in exhibits.