Say it like this

For the child

A robot is a machine with a body that does a job.

That is it. It does not have to look like a person. Most of them do not. There are robots that are just an arm bolted to a table in a factory, doing the same thing over and over, all day, without getting bored, because a robot cannot get bored.

Every robot needs two things. Something to notice with, and something to move with. A robot vacuum notices a wall with a little bumper and moves with wheels. If it could not notice anything, it would just drive into the wall forever.

And somebody had to teach it. A robot never wakes up and decides to do something. Somebody, somewhere, gave it instructions first.

For the grown-up

What is actually going on underneath

The useful distinction to establish here is robot versus artificial intelligence, because children mix them up constantly and so does most advertising.

A robot is the body: sensors, actuators, and a control system that turns one into the other. Artificial intelligence is a way of deciding what to do, and it does not need a body at all. Most of the AI a child interacts with lives in a phone with no moving parts. Most of the robots in the world are industrial arms with no AI in them at all, running fixed instructions.

The phrase to avoid is "the robot decided." Even when the control system is genuinely adaptive, it is still following a process somebody built. Children will meet plenty of material that says otherwise, so establishing the honest version first gives them something to compare it against.

Do something with it

Draw a robot that helps

Draw a robot that does one job in your house. Label how it notices things and how it moves. Then say who would have to teach it.

Open the activity

Ask afterward

Four questions that usually go somewhere

What does your robot notice with? What does it move with?
Is a dishwasher a robot? What is missing?
What job would you never want a robot to do?
Who taught the robot? What if they taught it badly?

Words in this one

If they ask what a word means

Robot A machine with a body that does a job, and somebody had to teach it how. Machine A thing built to do a job that would otherwise take a person a lot of effort. Artificial Intelligence A computer that has looked at so many examples it can start guessing about things it has never seen before. Algorithm A list of steps for getting something done, written out so carefully that a machine can follow it. Computer A machine that follows instructions very fast and never gets bored of doing the same thing again.

If they want more

The books

When an idea turns out to be worth forty pages instead of two, it becomes a book, and the books live next door at DigitalCrayonBooks.com. Here is how the two sites divide the work.