Culturally Responsive Social Robotics Instruction for Middle School Girls

Abstract

To attract more female students to study human-robot interaction (HRI) and robotics in college, new approaches for engaging middle and high school students need to be developed. This paper presents a unique approach to teaching middle school girls primary human-robot interaction concepts and humanoid robot programming using culturally responsive pedagogy. We describe what culturally responsive social robotics (CRSR) instruction is, how we incorporated CRSR and human-robot interaction instruction into a middle school girls social robotics program, and how we evaluated its effectiveness using mixed methods evaluation.