Collective co-design activities with children for designing classroom robots

Abstract

In order to design classroom robots that meet children's expectations, it may be useful to involve children in the design process. In this paper, we propose a suite of activities that can be utilized collectively to help in co-designing classroom robots. We outline the details of a combination of activities including building a robot model using a dedicated robot toolkit, a placement activity, a story-telling activity, and an interview. We explore the use of these activities through a study with 31 children (8-15 years old), where we analyzed the data using a framework for the design of social robots extended to cover the classroom situation. Our study showed that the activities could help distinguish some clear group preferences regarding the embodiment of the robot, especially the head, arms, and legs, the role of the robot, and the personality. While we used these activities in a study to illustrate their use for an open-ended design process of a classroom robot, we argue that the proposed suite of activities complement each other and may help robot designers to involve children in the design process in a holistic way. This can allow designers to gain elaborate and in-depth insight from children who do not usually (and necessarily) have domain knowledge in classroom robot technologies, and can promote them to articulate ideas and views about the prospective attributes in terms of physical appearance, contextual behavior, and social interaction.