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This book presents a comprehensive guide to the design of playing robots and the related play experiences. Play is a natural activity for building and improving abilities, and it reveals important particularly for persons with disabilities. Many social, physical and cultural factors may hinder children with disabilities from fully enjoying play as their peers. Autonomous robots with specific characteristics can enhance the ludic experience, having implications for the character of the play and presenting opportunities related to autonomy and physical movement, the very nature of robots. Their introduction into play thus provides everybody, and in particular persons with disabilities, new possibilities for developing abilities, improving general status, participating in social contexts, as well as supporting professionals in monitoring progress.This book presents a framework for the design of playful activities with robots, developed over 20 years' experience at AIRLab - POLIMI. Part 1 introduces the play concepts and characteristics, and research results about play of children with different kinds of impairments. Part 2 focuses on implementing robots able to play. The design of playful activities is discussed, as well as the necessary characteristics for them to be useful in both general play and activities involving disability-related limitations. In Part 3, the defined framework is used to analyze possibilities involving robots available on the toy market, robots developed at research labs, and robots to be developed in the next future. The aim of the book is to give developers, caregivers, and users a set of methodological tools for selecting, exploring, and designing inclusive play activities where robots play a central role.

This book comes as one of the outcomes of the COST Action ¿LUDI ¿ Play for children with disabilities¿ (2014-2018), a multidisciplinary network including more than 32 countries and 100 researchers and practitioners from the humanistic and technological fields, devoted to study the topic of play for children with disabilities. The primary objective of this book, developed within the scientific activities of the Working Group no. 1, is to review the state of the art of knowledge on play evaluation and to present and discuss existing tools and methodologies for play assessment. Gathering all the existing knowledge in this area of study is urgent; moreover, this knowledge must be harnessed for an innovative goal, potentially disruptive in the overall conception of disability. In fact, it concerns the need to give children with disabilities the opportunity to play as they want, as they wish, in an autonomous way. Establishing the goal of respecting the play for the sake of play of children with disabilities means building an authoritative, appropriate and competent area in favour of these children¿s needs. ABSTRACTING & INDEXING Evaluation of childrens' play is covered by the following services: Baidu ScholarBayerische StaatsbibliothekBDSBoDBowker Book DataCiandoCNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure)DimensionsDOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)EBSCOElsevier ¿ Scopus BooksExLibrisGoogle BooksGoogle ScholarNavigaReadCubeSemantic ScholarTDOne (TDNet)WorldCat (OCLC)X-MOLAdditionally, the proceedings volume is registered and indexed in the Crossref database and accessible on Amazon.

Play is the most important activity and a right for children with disabilities; to be playful, it should be funny, intrinsically motivated, interactive, inclusive. It should overcome possible impairments, and it should be facilitiated by environmental accomodations. Awareness and knowledge on the topic need to be increased and disseminated among families and professionals.--