The Design of Robothings : Non-Anthropomorphic and Non-Verbal Robots to Promote Childrens Collaboration Through Play

Abstract

Play is the most critical “job” of a child: it is fun, but it also involves learning and training collaboration. The social skills needed to collaborate are the most sought-after socio-emotional competencies for the 21st-century but are often overlooked in educational systems worldwide. Social robotic technology could play a significant role in supporting children’s learning of collaborative skills if designed in a responsible and developmentally appropriate fashion. In education, social robots successfully leverage their ability to communicate socially to support children’s learning. However, by replicating school formats and activities, tutoring robots might bring more challenges than solutions. Researchers in Human-Robot Interaction and Child-Robot Interaction are increasingly exploring new pedagogical paradigms for social robots for children, focusing on play rather than tutoring. What if the technology we design for children could nurture the social skills of children through play? What if the toys children play with could support children’s collaboration through play in a developmentally appropriate way? This dissertation motivates, theorizes, operationalizes, and evaluates the design space of toys endowed with social robotic technology to support children’s collaboration in play. We define these social robots as robothings. The term robothing derives from the term robot and the term thing. The prefix ‘robo’ is an abbreviation of the word robot. It indicates an autonomous artificial agent that is embodied and communicates. The suffix thing is related to the word ‘thing’, but it connects with the concept of things developed by the philosopher Bruno Latour. For Latour, everyday objects are not inanimate, nor are simple tools. Objects shape how we perform actions (e.g., a crutch changes the way we walk and experience moving in the space); they extend our capabilities (e.g., the microscope extends our vision capabilities and our knowledge about nature), shaping how we make sense of ourselves and the world, supporting and influencing how people act and make sense of the world. Thus, conceptually robothings refer to things as a robotic mediator of the children-world relationship. Concretely, robothings are hybrids between objects and social robots. Robothings are low/non-anthropomorphic robots that communicate their prosocial intentions to influence people’s behaviors, leveraging their nonverbal communication affordances. We conceptualize the role of a robothing as an interactive ‘thing’, with its agency, rather than a human-like partner (e.g., teacher, friend) that aims at a human-like agency Two facets are central in designing robothings to promote collaboration among children in play. The first facet is the operationalization of the robothing’s intervention and the effects on children’s collaboration of such an intervention. The second facet is the design of effective robothing’s communication relying solely on non-anthropomorphic affordances and nonverbal communication. As a result, the dissertation has two overarching aims: To investigate how robots that have less human-like form and behaviors can promote children’s (7-11 years old) collaboration through play, and to probe the design space of non-anthropomorphic nonverbal social communication in child-robot interaction. We crystallize intervention and communication dynamics of a robothing in collaborative play in a conceptual framework derived from multidisciplinary literature. At the intervention level, a robothing supports collaboration by promoting prosocial behavior by behaving prosocially in collaborative play. To this end, a robothing communicates its prosocial intention in ‘human terms’. Communicating in human terms means leveraging the human tendency of parsing contingent movement as intentional. Drawing from the conceptual framework and a behavioral observation study of children, we explored how to design child-robothing communication in collaborative play and ev