Background
With the popularity of robotics education, attention has been drawn to understand students’ perceptions of robots. This study proposes a framework of robot identity to understand students’ imagination about and perceptions of robots through their literary products. The identity of robot is framed to consist of four dimensions: nature identity, social identity, emotional identity, and evolutionary identity. We applied the framework to examine 80 literary products generated by 16 students to probe their imaginations about and perceptions of robots in a sixth-grade course that integrated robotics programming and literacy. In the course, students wrote and drew about future robots, developed stories from their computer code, and created digital comics.
Results
Students’ products demonstrated a wide range of variation in terms of robot identity and the robot’s overall resemblance to human. Portraying robots as human-like was more popular among these students than machine-like. For the evolutionary identity, students had mostly a positive vision. In terms of individual characteristics, some students blurred the boundary between robots and humans whereas others drew a clear line between the two.
Conclusions
The study proposes a new framework that expands our understanding of how humans perceive robots, and demonstrates the great potential of the literary products of different modalities in revealing students’ perceptions of robots.
Note: The manuscript of this study has been recently accepted by the Journal of Research on Technology in Education.

Author(s): Changzhao Wang, Ji Shen, & Hua Ran​​​​