What did spot hide?

Early literacy is critical to child development, and determines a child's later educational and life opportunities. Moreover, preschool children are incessantly inquisitive, and will readily engage in question answering and asking activities if given the opportunity. We argue here that question asking/answering technologies can play a major role in early literacy. We describe the design and evaluation of a conversational agent called Spot, with the goal of engaging children in a 20-questions game. Towards this goal, we conducted a feasibility study to determine if children's questions are "on-topic" and suitable for ASR/dialogue systems. We evaluated Spot's performance at conducting a game of 20-questions against that of a human partner.