Social Robots: Second Session

By Rachel Ware and Pranati Guduru

The Social Robots virtual camp took place last week from August 2nd to the 6th. Fourteen middle school students total attended the camp with about 13 students attending every day. This was a collaboration of students and researchers from Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh who worked together to make the week-long camp a success.

The curriculum encompassed both computer science topics and Theatre of the Oppressed activities to engage power and identity as connected to the students’ approaches and thoughts throughout. For the computer science topics, block coding was included where students programmed the virtual robot Symmi who served as a social robot agent that chatted with the students about their plans and thoughts about each coding activity. Artificial intelligence (AI) was also covered, including the impact of algorithmic bias, several activities about AI training data, and a final project where the students mapped out an idea for their own AI to solve an issue they thought of in the world.

The students had more advanced background knowledge of computer science concepts than the previous camp participants from the first Social Robots session in July which allowed us to dive deeper into many of the topics. They were engaged and willingly offered their own inputs and solutions to difficult problems. One of the girls even said that they had some knowledge of cryptocurrency.

The Theatre of the Oppressed activities, which were led by Dr. Nkrumah, engaged and encouraged the students to express themselves while learning more about being in tune with their identity, power dynamics, and culture. For example, Dr. Nkrumah facilitated an activity that included utilizing our bodies to represent a word that Nkrumah chose with a pose. The students recognized identity in the different poses, as one said, “everyone interprets things differently based on who they are.”