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Co-designing a Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention to Regulate Children's Handwriting Posture

Chenyang Wang, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Barbara Bruno, Pierre Dillenbourg

TL;DR

The paper introduces CRNI, a passive, relational-norm-based approach to influencing children's handwriting posture by eliciting a robot's aversive reaction to norm violations. It formalizes the concept, situates it within the iReCHeCk handwriting-support system, and demonstrates feasibility through two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher. Through workshop-driven design, the study identifies disturbances that are perceived as effective for robot and human peers, with 'erase the writing' emerging as the strongest candidate. Results indicate high child preference for a robot peer, potential for empathetic engagement, and positive implications for sustained posture regulation, while noting limitations such as anthropomorphism risks and the need for real-world testing. Overall, CRNI offers a novel, indirect mechanism to motivate self-regulation via social norm dynamics in child-robot interaction.

Abstract

Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children's behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social robots and children's reluctance to inconvenience others to influence children's behaviours. Unlike traditional persuasive strategies that employ robots in active roles, CRNI utilizes an indirect approach by generating a disturbance for the robot in response to improper child behaviours, thereby motivating behaviour change through the avoidance of norm violations. The feasibility of CRNI is explored with a focus on improving children's handwriting posture. To this end, as a preliminary work, we conducted two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher to identify effective disturbances that can promote posture correction.

Co-designing a Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention to Regulate Children's Handwriting Posture

TL;DR

The paper introduces CRNI, a passive, relational-norm-based approach to influencing children's handwriting posture by eliciting a robot's aversive reaction to norm violations. It formalizes the concept, situates it within the iReCHeCk handwriting-support system, and demonstrates feasibility through two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher. Through workshop-driven design, the study identifies disturbances that are perceived as effective for robot and human peers, with 'erase the writing' emerging as the strongest candidate. Results indicate high child preference for a robot peer, potential for empathetic engagement, and positive implications for sustained posture regulation, while noting limitations such as anthropomorphism risks and the need for real-world testing. Overall, CRNI offers a novel, indirect mechanism to motivate self-regulation via social norm dynamics in child-robot interaction.

Abstract

Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children's behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social robots and children's reluctance to inconvenience others to influence children's behaviours. Unlike traditional persuasive strategies that employ robots in active roles, CRNI utilizes an indirect approach by generating a disturbance for the robot in response to improper child behaviours, thereby motivating behaviour change through the avoidance of norm violations. The feasibility of CRNI is explored with a focus on improving children's handwriting posture. To this end, as a preliminary work, we conducted two participatory design workshops with 12 children and 1 teacher to identify effective disturbances that can promote posture correction.
Paper Structure (15 sections, 3 figures)

This paper contains 15 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Regulating Children’s Posture When Interacting with Tablets via CRNI
  3. Participatory Design
  4. Design Workshop I
  5. Method and Materials
  6. Procedures
  7. Design Workshop II
  8. Method and Materials
  9. Procedures
  10. Results And Discussion
  11. Children's Designs in Workshop I
  12. Children's Design Assessment in Workshop II
  13. Teacher's Feedback
  14. Robot Peer vs Human Peer
  15. Limitations and Future Works

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Photos and poster B of Workshop I
  • Figure 2: Design results of Workshop I. The top three bold font designs were showcased in Workshop II.
  • Figure 3: (a) The disturbance design results of one group in Workshop I. Left poster A for human peers and right poster B for robot peers. (b) The final design assessment of children in Workshop II.