Preschool educators play an important role in supporting children’s emotion regulation capacities in ways that promote their socio-emotional and behavioral health. However, tracking children’s emotional changes and giving timely intervention to every child in the class simultaneously is challenging for preschool educators. In this paper, we use the "calm-down corner," which is widely used in classrooms with spaces where children can regain emotional control, as a probe to explore the design space of technology-supported preschool educators dealing with children’s emotional problems through one semi-structured interview with ten preschool educators and one co-design session with another 12 preschool educators. We summarized current challenges and the design considerations from preschool educators’ perspective, which could offer valuable insights for technology-enabled systems to facilitate the emotion regulation process for educators in the future.

Robots in children’s group activities must coordinate with the local organization of talk, participation, and attention. Yet robots sometimes act in ways that participants treat as misfitting the ongoing interaction. We conceptualize these moments as interactional misalignment. Drawing on conversation analysis of video-recorded robot-mediated group activities across multiple sites, we develop an inductive taxonomy of recurrent misalignments between robot conduct and participants’ orientations: turn-taking, sensorial, epistemic, deontic, and uptake-related. Across cases, children manage these moments through laughter, resistance, correction, and peer coordination, sustaining progress while revealing expectations for accountable robot behavior. We then propose a taxonomy-driven repair challenge protocol for evaluating robots’ sensitivity to participants’ displayed orientations, reframing robustness in group child--robot interaction as interactional adaptation rather than error prevention.