Introducing students grades 6–12 to expressive robotics

Every year, tens of thousands of middle school and high school students participate in robotics competitions, such as Botball, FIRST, and VEX. This provides them with an excellent introduction to the ins and outs of building robots and programming them to autonomously accomplish specific tasks. However, the rules of many of these competitions often limit or prohibit human interaction with the robots. As a result, students are not exposed to and are, thus, not encouraged to think about human-robot interaction (HRI) and its potential impacts on society. To start getting a new generation of students thinking about HRI, a workshop was held entitled “Expressive Robotics: Motion and Emotion” at the 2011 Global Conference on Educational Robotics. The focus of the workshop was to teach the students how to program robots to express emotion and intent just through the robot's physical actions. The robot used by each participating group was not unlike the ones they used in competitions: an iRobot Create base provided a mobile platform, upon which stood a three degree-of-freedom arm, serving as an articulated spine and head. The students were then tasked with implementing a simple keyframe animation system to control the robot's limited degrees of freedom, which they could then modify to illustrate certain principles from theatre and animation. They used their animation system to tell a story purely through robot motion and interactions with props. The exposure to sociable robotics has the potential to increase interest and self-efficacy of underrepresented student populations, particularly girls, in STEM-related activities.