In an eight-week STEAM education program for elementary school children, kids worked on musical theater projects with a variety of robots. The program included 4 modules about acting, dancing, music & sounds, and drawing. Twenty-five children grades K-5 participated in this program. Children were excited by the program and they demonstrated collaboration and peer-to-peer interactive learning. In the future, we plan to add more robust interaction and more science and engineering experiences to the program. This program is expected to promote STEM education in the informal learning environment by combining it with arts and design.

Physical embodiment of robots provides users with a social environment. To design social robots further to be accepted as our companions, we need to understand the essential factors and implement them and so, users get to bring them to their personal environments. To this aim, we focused on two important factors in robotic companionship: robot appearance (look) and emotional expression (feel). Twenty-one participants played an online game with the help from two humanoid robots, Nao (more human-like looking) and Darwin (less human-like looking). Participants interacted with each robot either with emotional words or without emotional words. Results show that only when the robot both looks more human-like and speaks with emotional expression, participants perceive it as their companion. Implications are discussed with future works.

We have tried to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for underserved students using interactive robots. As an advanced attempt to integrate art and design into STEM education (i.e., STEAM), in the present paper we introduce our afterschool program in which elementary students create live theatre using multiple robots as actors. We hope to receive feedback and comments on our afterschool curriculum and case study, and thus, we can run better sessions at schools and make a standardized protocol regarding this robot actors approach.