If I had a Robot it should do Everything for me: Children’s Attitudes to Robots in Everyday Life

Abstract

This paper presents evaluation research studying Danish children's attitudes towards robotic technologies. The purpose of the paper is to focus on children's contextualisation and evaluation of different robotic technologies and discuss an approach combining contextual and technical issues in a learning context. It appears from this study that children know pretty much about robots, and they distinguish between different kinds of robots, and their attitudes towards robots is rather complex. It seems that children evaluate robots from four elements of technology, which consist of technical perspectives, sociological perspectives, knowledge perspectives and cultural perspectives. The paper is based on comparisons between two groups of children aged 9-14 with different experiences of building a robot. One group participated in the robotic competition First Lego League (FLL), which goal is to give children positive attitudes towards science and technology, including robots. The other group of children did not participate in FLL.