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Title: The Design of Co-Robotic Games for Computer Science Education
Digital games featuring programmable agents are popular tools for teaching coding and computational thinking skills. However, today's games perpetuate an arguably obsolete relationship between programmable agents and human operators. Borrowing from the field of human-robotics interaction, we argue that collaborative robots, or cobots, are a better model for thinking about computational agents, working directly with humans rather than in place of or at arm's length from them. In this paper, we describe an initial design inquiry into the design of “cobot games”, programmable agent scenarios in which players program an in-game ally to assist them in accomplishing gameplay objectives. We detail three questions that emerged out of this exploration, our present thinking on them, and plans for deepening inquiry into cobot game design moving forward.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1906753
PAR ID:
10340224
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
CHI PLAY '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
Page Range / eLocation ID:
111 to 116
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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