Kevin Crowley
Papers
11
Total Citations
422
H-Index
8
About
Kevin Crowley is a prominent researcher at the intersection of robotics education, human-robot interaction, and informal learning, whose work has fundamentally shaped how educators and technologists think about integrating robots into learning environments. Based at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center, Crowley has made substantial contributions to understanding how people — particularly children and young students — learn alongside and about intelligent machines. His most influential work includes co-developing the Robotic Autonomy curriculum, a mobile robotics course for secondary students that garnered 154 citations and established rigorous frameworks for both robot design and educational assessment. Crowley's research on children's beliefs about robot intelligence (86 citations) offered rare empirical insight into how early exposure to intelligent technologies reshapes foundational concepts like sentience and cognition. His long-running Personal Exploration Rover project extended these questions into museum and informal learning settings, demonstrating that meaningful robotics education can thrive outside traditional classrooms. Crowley also championed equity in STEM through initiatives like Robot Diaries, a robotics program specifically designed for middle school girls. With over 400 cumulative citations, his body of work remains an essential reference for researchers, educators, and designers working at the frontier of educational robotics and human-robot collaboration.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Formal measures of learning in a secondary school mobile robotics course80 citations · 2004
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- 5Working with a robot19 citations · 2007
- 6Educational Results of the Personal Exploration Rover Museum Exhibit18 citations · 2006
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- 9Developing technological fluency through creative robotics7 citations · 2010
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