Robots, Bullies and Stories: A Remote Co-design Study with Children

Bullying in schools is a widespread problem with serious consequences. We are exploring the use of social robots and role-playing to foster anti-bullying peer-support. In this paper, we present results from a co-design study with 22 children (8-12 years old) to explore how they envision a “student robot”. To understand how they conceptualize bullying in this context (e.g. whether robots can be bullied), we also investigated how they envision this robot’s various social interactions. We prompted children to imagine a fictional robot about their age and follow a stepwise process to design the robot, and make stories about its interactions. Qualitative analysis of this study suggests themes of robots being described as highly-customizable characters with predominantly positive traits, that are imperfect. We also found that children can articulate various scenarios involving robots taking roles of bullies, victims, and bystanders. These findings contribute insights for designing pedagogical robots and anti-bullying interventions for children.