Imagining robots of the future: Examining sixth-graders’ perceptions of robots through their literary products

Abstract

With the popularity of robotics education, attention has been drawn to students’ perceptions of robots. This study provides a framework to understand students’ imagination about and perceptions of robots from four dimensions of robot identity—nature, social, emotional, and evolutionary. We applied the framework on 80 literary products generated by 16 sixth-grade students in a course that integrated robotics programming and literacy, such as writing and drawing about their imagination of future robots, and digital comics developed from their stories about robot. The analyses revealed a wide range of variation in terms of robot identity and the robot’s overall resemblance to human.