In recent years, the use of robotics and artificial intelligence has come to the fore. The public is divided into three groups where one group is beginning to fear the advent of artificial intelligence (in the form of robots), the other is looking forward to its advent and enthusiastically anticipates the improvement of the future through artificial intelligence, and the third group has not yet formed an opinion. Artificial intelligence is a topic not only for scientists, neuroscientists and programmers, but also for teachers, who already need to prepare pupils for the future, not only by developing their cognitive abilities, but above all by developing their moral competences and moral attitudes. How the arrival of AI robots is evaluated by older school-age children is the research question of a qualitative experimental design that took place in Slovakia in 2020/2021 and followed the communication and behaviour of three different groups of children with the NAO robot. Each group consisted of seven children aged between 11 and 14 years. The difference in the groups was the type of school the children attended and the family background they came from. The differences in communication and interaction with the NAO robot were significant between normal children, children on the autism spectrum with above average intelligence, and children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Enthusiasm, fear, apprehension, and moral and emotional inhibitions were manifested differently in each child, based on self-esteem, IT competencies, and perceived beliefs and fears from the family environment. The paper was supported by the KEGA project 046UK-4/2021 Supporting the implementation of moral education in primary school: applied research and methodological material for teachers.

robot NAO; implicit theories; social interaction; communication; school age children