Play-Testing REMind: Evaluating an Educational Robot-Mediated Role-Play Game

TL;DR

This paper introduces REMind, a robot-mediated role-play game that enhances children's social-emotional skills and anti-bullying intervention strategies through an innovative, interactive pedagogical approach.

Contribution

It presents a novel educational framework, Robot-Mediated Applied Drama (RMAD), and evaluates its effectiveness in promoting social-emotional learning among children.

Findings

Supported key learning goals like self-efficacy and perspective-taking.

Enhanced understanding of defending outcomes and intervention strategies.

Demonstrated promise of RMAD as a pedagogical framework.

Abstract

This paper presents REMind, an innovative educational robot-mediated role-play game designed to support anti-bullying bystander intervention among children. REMind invites players to observe a bullying scenario enacted by social robots, reflect on the perspectives of the characters, and rehearse defending strategies by puppeteering a robotic avatar. We evaluated REMind through a mixed-methods play-testing study with 18 children aged 9--10. The findings suggest that the experience supported key learning goals related to self-efficacy, perspective-taking, understanding outcomes of defending, and intervention strategies. These results highlight the promise of Robot-Mediated Applied Drama (RMAD) as a novel pedagogical framework to support Social-Emotional Learning.