Robots for Inclusive Play: Co-designing an Educational Game With Visually Impaired and sighted Children

This paper has been selected for a Best Paper award at CHI2020.The SIGCHI “Best of CHI” awards honour exceptional submissions to SIGCHI sponsored conferences.A total of 31 Papers received a Best Paper award (top 1% of submissions), 125 papers received Honourable Mention (remaining top 5% of submissions). Process: the Best Paper Committee, which includes the Awards Chairs and 19 committee members (one from each subcommittee), adjudicated the selection of the Best Papers and Honourable Mentions based on nomination scores and paragraphs that were provided by the CHI Associate Chairs.; International audience; Despite being included in mainstream schools, visually impaired children still face barriers to social engagement and participation. Games could potentially help, but games that cater for both visually impaired and sighted players are scarce. We used a co-design approach to design and evaluate a robot-based educational game that could be inclusive of both visually impaired and sighted children in the context of mainstream education. We ran a focus group discussion with visual impairment educators to understand barriers to inclusive play. And then a series of co-design workshops to engage visually impaired and sighted children and educators in learning about robot technology and exploring its potential to support inclusive play experiences. We present design guidelines and an evaluation workshop of a game prototype, demonstrating group dynamics conducive to collaborative learning experiences, including shared goal setting/execution, closely coupled division of labour, and interaction symmetry.