Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction: The Personal Exploration Rover and Museum Docents

As an increasing number of robots have been designed to interact with people on a regular basis, research into human-robot interaction has become more widespread. At the same time, little work has been done on the problem of longterm human-robot interaction, in which a human uses a robot for a period of weeks or months. As people spend more time with a robot, it is expected that how they make sense of the robot - their ?ognitive model?of it - may change over time. In order to identify factors that will be critical to the future development of a quantitative cognitive model of long-term human-robot interaction, a study was conducted involving the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) museum exhibit and the museum employees responsible for it. Results of the study suggest that these critical factors include how people experience successes and failures with the robot (as opposed to how they understand its capabilities) and how people anthropomorphize the robot and talk about anthropomorphization.</p

A Roadmap for Technology Literacy and a Vehicle for Getting There: Educational Robotics and the TeRK Project

Current technology literacy trends in the United States show declining interest and engagement in technological fields of study. We propose a roadmap by which robotics applications can enliven technology education and capture the interest of new students. We also describe our current efforts to design appropriate technologies and apply them at the middle school, high school, and college levels.</p

TeRK: A Flexible Tool for Science and Technology Education

We present TeRK, a new contribution to the field of educational robotics. TeRK combines a highly functional, low cost controller, the Qwerk, with an extensive software infrastructure and lively web community to lower the barrier to entry for students, hobbyists, artists and researchers interested in using robotic technologies. We further describe our experiences in applying TeRK to engage and excite two audiences; middle school girls and students taking the introductory computer science course.</p

Robot Diaries Interim Project Report: Development of a Technology Program for Middle School Girls

Robot Diaries is a technology program for middle school girls. This report provides a summary of the first and second years of the Robot Diaries project and a description of how the lessons learned from these two years are guiding the third year of the project.</p

The Personal Exploration Rover: The Ground-up Design, Deployment and Educational Evaluation of an Educational Robot for Unmediated Informal Learning Sites

Robotics brings together learning across mechanism, computation and interaction using the compelling model of real-time interaction with a physically instantiated intelligent device. The project described here is the third stage of the Personal Rover Project, which aims to produce technology, curriculum and evaluation techniques for use with after-school, out-of-school and informal learning environments mediated by robotics. Our most recent work has resulted in the Personal Exploration Rover (PER), whose goal is to create and evaluate a robot interaction that will educate members of the general public in an informal learning environment and capitalize on the current enthusiasm and excitement produced by NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs). We have two specific goals of teaching about the role of rovers as tools for scientific exploration and teaching about the importance of robot autonomy. To this effect we have designed an interactive, robotic museum exhibit which has been deployed at six locations across the United States. Here we describe the robot hardware and software designed for this task, the exhibits developed, and the results of formal evaluation of the exhibits' educational impact on museum visitors.</p