When children and adults work together as partners throughout the design process in a collaborative and elaborative manner, children come up with a wide range of creative and innovative ideas. The 5-step plan is a holistic approach that empowers children as robotic product designers. Researchers as well as educators can use the approach to introduce children with different interests to robotics and explore their interests, desires and needs regarding interactive technology like robots. In this paper, we describe the 5-step plan and present our findings on children’s robotic product ideas from three case studies.