In 2005, students at Spelman College established The Spelbots Robotics Team where they could engage in departmental activities, innovative projects and scholarly endeavors across campus and throughout the community. The goal is to encourage students and young women of African descent to explore robotics and computer science. One major advantage of this outreach program is that we are able to interact with all students in target grades, not only those who are already interested in computers, as would happen with a computer club or other extracurricular programs. This research presented is a sampling of the periodic outreach curriculum activities led by volunteer students. Through these activities participants have the opportunity to learn about a variety of computing topics and interact with systems not regularly offered. The core goal of this program is to increase the interest levels in computing among these young students. While the long-term effects are not immediately apparent, participating students indicate that activities are making a valuable impact. This is supported through personal observations of, and interactions with, the student participants.

Human-Robotic Interaction is an emergent field that has been studied for years in much breadth and depth. The use of robots as emotional and therapeutic support aids has been researched with aging and socially exceptional individuals. As conversation based agents such as Siri and Alexa are becoming more prevalent in our society, there has been a desire to make agents more responsive to human social and emotional context cues. Early agent development focused on the ability of these agents to respond with appropriate content as opposed to identifying context related cues for more nuanced dialogue. Our research question asks "Can a robot that shows empathy build a stronger connection to a human user?" We seek to answer this question through the development and deployment of EmoBot - an emotionally responsive robot. EmoBot will provide a simple query to users, "How are you doing?" and will respond accordingly with emotionally sensitive engagements and responses. The EmoBot dialog agent will engage with 3 sentiment types (positive, neutral and negative) and is programmed in Python on the NAOqi SDK for Choreograph.
Researchers:
Lea Davis
Maraya Burks

This project incorporates healthy coping mechanisms for students who struggle with non-clinical anxiety through the use of a Virtual Reality(VR) application. Using VR, instead of a traditional application, allows the student to be fully immersed in a calming environment that projects a subdued tone. In this environment, there are rooms meant to support different coping strategies. The prototype room that has been created provides the player with the opportunity to participate in an art therapy exercise, which therapists sometimes use to help treat various mental illnesses, including anxiety. When the full application is completed, the combination of the environment and rooms will seamlessly work together in an attempt to help those suffering from non-clinical anxiety. Upon completion of the prototype application, its effectiveness will be assessed by determining the level of anxiousness the user feels after completing the exercises and comparing that to how they felt before using the application. It is the long-term objective of the research to create a game that can be utilized for helping students develop and maintain a healthy mental state.