Collaborative Research: Social Robot Norm Co-Design for Classroom Environments

Creating classroom environments where all students can collaborate, participate, and learn is essential for preparing the next generation of scientists, engineers, and informed citizens. Education researchers have developed methods for helping teachers co-create classroom norms with students to promote positive classroom culture. Unfortunately, these approaches and the educational technologies that support them often rely on broad norms such as "be polite" or "listen to the teacher" that may fail to acknowledge or address the power dynamics underlying many classroom norm violations. This project investigates whether socially responsible social robots can help students collaboratively develop classroom norms that are more inclusive, empowering, and reflective of their communities' values. By engaging students as active designers of artificial intelligence rather than passive users, the project seeks to strengthen artificial intelligence literacy, collaborative problem solving, and ethical reasoning while advancing participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The resulting methods, curriculum materials, and open design approaches will help educators and communities develop artificial intelligence technologies that better reflect local values, supporting the National Science Foundation's mission to advance scientific progress while benefiting society through improved education and workforce development. Across three project phases, the research investigates how students can co-design social robots that follow, communicate, and learn classroom norms through end-user programming activities grounded in theories of socially responsible technology design. The project brings together expertise in human-robot interaction, socially responsible STEM pedagogy, participatory design, large language models, and interactive machine learning to develop and evaluate the Facilitated Iterative Robot End-User Programming (FIRE-UP) framework. The research will examine (1) how robot values and norms can be created during different phases of the design process of morally competent robots; (2) how robots can be designed to reflect community values while using pre-trained foundation models; (3) how interactive machine learning techniques can improve language-capable robots' moral competence; (4) how robot design can serve as an opportunity for moral reflection; (5) how these technical innovations impact classroom culture; and (6) how these effects differ across educational contexts. The framework will be evaluated through deployments in summer programs in Colorado and Los Angeles, producing new scientific knowledge about community-driven robot design, morally competent artificial intelligence, and socially responsible educational robotics. This project was funded by the STEM K-12 program, which supports fundamental, applied, and translational research on STEM learning in both formal K-12 education and informal learning environments. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.