Robotics may be an ideal way to teach cybersecurity concepts to young students in the elementary classroom. Research shows robots can be an engaging experience and benefit learning in ways useful in other areas of education. Programming robots provides an ideal context for compelling demonstrations of cybersecurity concepts. Unplugged robotics activities benefit from the engaging aspect of robots but have the added advantage of bypassing hardware and making some concepts more transparent. Señor Robot is a gamified unplugged robotics activity modeled after some activities used before but specifically designed for cybersecurity education in the context of mathematics. The design and implementation of Señor Robot in a third-grade classroom is discussed along with observations and results of student assessments. Strengths and weaknesses of Señor Robot are examined and guide a proposed revision of the game called Frogbotics. An expanded instruction set and applicability to English language arts are considered along with ways to use Frogbotics to teach specific topics in cybersecurity. A website is provided as a dissemination point for materials developed in the study.
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FLEXI: A Robust and Flexible Social Robot Embodiment Kit
The social robotics market is appealing yet challenging. Though social robots are built few remain on the market for long. Many reasons account for their short lifespan with costs and context-specificity ranking high amount them. In this work, we designed, fabricated, and developed FLEXI, a social robot embodiment kit that enabled unlimited customization, making it applicable for a broad range of use cases. The hardware and software of FLEXI were entirely developed by this research team from scratch. FLEXI includes a rich set of materials and attachment pieces to allow for a diverse range of hardware customizations that ensure the embodiment is appropriate for specific customer/researcher projects. It also includes an open-source end-user programming interface to lower the barrier of robotics access to interdisciplinary teams that populate the field of Human-Robot Interaction. We present an iterative development of this cost-effective kit through the lenses of case studies, conceptual research, and soft deployment of FLEXI in three application scenarios: community-support, mental health, and education. Additionally, we provide in open-access the full list of materials and a tutorial to fabricate FLEXI, making it accessible to any maker space, research lab, or workshop space interested in working with or learning about social robots.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10386126
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '22: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1177 to 1191
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533541
