Developing a Zoomorphic Robot for Animal Welfare Education

Animal welfare education (AWE) could greatly benefit from customized robotics to help children learn about animal sentience and emotions, and thereby promote compassion towards animals. As part of my work to realize this, I used an existing zoomorphic robot to investigate children's perception of its mental abilities and their attitudes to cruelty to robots, with findings promising for use as a parallel to live animals. Subsequently, I used the participatory design methodology to engage animal welfare educators and children to discover key design features for a zoomorphic robot for AWE, which are being included in a prototype. Future work will evaluate the effectiveness of this robot in an AWE program. This interdisciplinary approach, combining principles from psychology, pedagogy, and human-robot interaction, aims to help AWE organizations change children's attitudes towards animals via robotics.