Robot Diaries

A Robot Diary is a customizable robot designed to serve as a means of expression for its creator. Using light, sound, and movement, users can choreograph their Robot Diaries to be responsive to a diary entry or other piece of text. Users can also enter into a community where they are able to share the contents of their Robot Diary with others. Ultimately, the robot diary provides a unique means of exploring, expressing, and sharing emotions, ideas and thoughts while promoting technological literacy and informal learning.

We are in the middle of the development cycle for our Robot Diaries curriculum. During the summer and fall of 2006 we conducted a series of praticipatory design workshops with middle school girls. The girls helped us confirm out hypothesis that a communicative robot could be fun and engaging for middle schoolers and helped us develop expressive robot prototypes. During 2007 we will complete the analysis of the data that we gathered over the fall and develop a Robot Diaries curriculum and robot kit based on our praticipatory design experiences. The following year we intend to disseminate the Robot Diaries curriculum to Boys and Girls clubs and Girl Scout Troops in the Pittsburgh area. This will give us a chance to test and refine the curriculum locally before disseminating more broadly.

During the spring of 2007, we also worked with C-MITES to refine and package a single-day creative robotics curriculum based on some of the workshops that we held during fall 2006. You can download this curriculum below or read more detail on the 2006 summer and fall workshops.

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