Cozmo Robot Land: How Children Co-Create Social Worlds Through Design

Abstract

Participatory design (PD) with children offers a powerful approach for co-creating technologies that are both engaging and developmentally appropriate. In this study, we present a two-hour PD workshop conducted with children aged 5-11 years to explore how children collaboratively design and imagine social roles for a robot-based system. The workshop was situated in a familiar playroom environment and employed low-fidelity prototyping materials to scaffold creative expression. Children were initially engaged in individual ideation tasks using inactive Cozmo robots, followed by spontaneous peer interaction that led to the emergence of a shared collaborative scenario, referred to as a “Robot Land.” Within this environment, children assigned roles to their robots, developed narratives, and used symbolic currency to support social exchanges. Qualitative analysis of observational and conversational data revealed that this emergent structure fostered key social processes including negotiation, coordination, and conflict resolution. The results highlight the value of childdriven, open-ended design contexts and inform the development of a subsequent intervention grounded in emergent collaborative play. Hence, this paper contributes (1) empirical evidence of emergent socio-economic systems in child-led PD, and (2) design implications for narrative-driven robot learning environments.