<p>Children engaging with robots tend to show an initial high interest that diminishes quickly after just a few interactions. This phenomenon is a challenge in designing robots for human-robot companionship (as well as human-robot interaction generally), but it also led us to wonder if we could leverage a child’s strong initial interest in novelty again and again to maintain engagement with a robot over long time horizons. In this work, we consider leaning into (rather than dreading) the novelty effect by employing modular hardware on an assistive robot that can be changed when a child’s interest wanes. To this end, we designed our wellness companion robot, GoBot, with changeable hardware. We conducted a three-month-long study with <i>N</i> = 8 participants to test whether changing modules after an initial acclimation period would revitalize children’s participation in the robot-mediated intervention (i.e., movement levels and engagement with the robot). The results of our study showed that exchanging hardware modules significantly bolstered child movement and engagement. We propose that modular hardware can be used to leverage the benefits of the novelty effect and extend interest in robots during long-term interactions. The products of this work can benefit researchers of robotics and child motor interventions.</p>