Robot Diaries >> Summer 2006

Focus Group

We began with a single two-hour focus group session with 7 girls to gather initial feedback on our Robot Diary idea. The girls were recruited through contacts with the CLICK! program, and so had some familiarity with and inclination towards science and technology. The focus group provided us with a glimpse into the technological lives of these middle school girls; all of the girls regularly used an internet enabled computer at home for sending email, but no girls had cell phones, or used Instant Messaging software. The primary complaint about these latter two modes of communication was that they were too disruptive – to our surprise, the girls appeared to prefer the non-disruptive, asynchronous communication mode inherent to email. Further, we found that half the girls used MySpace or a similar “friends” site, and that none of them kept an online or paper diary. We also presented several robot concepts to the girls, but these were criticized for being purposeless and disruptive in the same way as a cell phone.

The girls’ opinions and reported behaviors provided a number of lessons to us about how to proceed; we noted that low information asynchronous communication was a more desired communication mode than high information phone and chat conversations. The focus-group was extremely effective in introducing the research team to the experience of working with middle-school girls. Unanimously, we were astonished by the girl’s high energy-levels and the effect this had on us as researchers. In addition, we quickly came to realize how imperative it was to keep the girls on-task; tangential comments and momentary digressions quickly spiraled into consuming conversations. This had significant impact on our planning of summer workshop sessions.

Summer Workshop Series

The next phase of the project was a series of six two-hour long workshops held during Summer 2006 at the Mount Lebanon Public Library. Two to seven girls attended each workshop, with the same three girls attending almost every session. The primary purpose of the summer workshops was to engage a small group of girls in a series of participatory design activities that would lead toward the development of a working prototype of a “Robot Diary” for use in the more structured Fall sessions. The summer workshops allowed the research team to work closely with a group of representative girls over an extended period of time in direct, “hands-on” cooperative exploration of robotic technology. This, in turn, provided four important opportunities:

• to experiment with a variety of participatory design activities and discover which were most effective and compelling for middle-school girls
• to develop research themes and observational measures
• to progress the concept (both form and function) of a “Robot Diary”
• to collect initial qualitative “data” from interviews, observations, and the participatory design activities

The sessions were structured such that a major robot related technology concept was introduced each week; in this way, girls experimented with batteries, switches, electric motors, servos, methods of producing sound, and LEDs. During each session, the first hour was generally devoted to introducing the technology and playing exploration games in which the girls were asked to express emotions by acting them out in front of the group using the introduced technology. During the second hour, girls were given time to explore the technology in the context of building a robot – they were provided with robot parts such as motors or LEDs, craft materials such as fake fur and hot glue, and encouraged to create a robot of their own design; the only constraints were that they needed to incorporate technologies from the current and previous sessions. The pictures on this page are all creations resulting from the girls’ explorations of robotic technologies during the summer workshops.

At the conclusion of this series of workshops, we synthesized our experiences and created a set of important lessons learned, listed here in brief:

• Providing specific and directed tasks is imperative
• There is a tendency to work with what is “at-hand”
• Prototyping is a difficult concept and task
• There is a predisposition to build anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms
• Not all craft materials are equally valuable
• Community involvement by parents and friends is important
• Room should be made for ‘Girl Culture’ during sessions