Developing a Robot Hip-Hop Dance Game to Engage Rural Minorities in Computer Science

Abstract

In this paper we discuss details on the preliminary development of an interactive, educational game that will be used to engage rural, minority, middle school students in computer science by incorporating hip-hop dance with a simulated robot. Although this work is in progress, our aim is to develop a culturally tailored educational experience, so that students will have increased perceptions and openness to computer science after interacting with the robot hip-hop programming game. In this short report, we discuss details of our game design. We also describe the methodology, in-progress usability assessments on lesson content, as well as the robot dance moves to include in the game development.