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The Design of Co-Robotic Games for Computer Science Education

Digital games featuring programmable agents are popular tools for teaching coding and computational thinking skills. However, today's games perpetuate an arguably obsolete relationship between programmable agents and human operators. Borrowing from the field of human-robotics interaction, we argue that collaborative robots, or cobots, are a better model for thinking about computational agents, working directly with humans rather than in place of or at arm's length from them. In this paper, we describe an initial design inquiry into the design of “cobot games”, programmable agent scenarios in which players program an in-game ally to assist them in accomplishing gameplay objectives. We detail three questions that emerged out of this exploration, our present thinking on them, and plans for deepening inquiry into cobot game design moving forward.