COHRI: CO-designing a Human-Robot Interface with and for teachers to bring social robots into the classroom

Social robots represent an emerging class of interactive systems with strong potential to support education. While prior research has primarily investigated their use as teachable tutors for academic content, this project addresses a currently underexplored challenge: how the physical embodiment and social interaction capabilities of robots can be leveraged to support children’s social skills development in primary school settings. The project makes a methodological and technological contribution by adopting a co-design approach to actively involve primary school teachers in the design of classroom interactions with a robot. Teachers bring essential pedagogical and domain expertise, ensuring that the resulting solutions are grounded in real educational practice. By co-designing with and for teachers, the project directly addresses barriers that have so far limited the adoption of social robots in schools, such as lack of usability, flexibility, and alignment with teaching needs. At the core of the project is the development of an innovative human–robot interface that enables teachers to customize and control robot behavior according to lesson-specific activities. From a technical perspective, the interface will be designed to be flexible, adaptable, and intuitive, allowing non-expert users to configure social robot interactions without requiring robotics or programming expertise. This directly focus on usable, human-centred ICT and robotic systems. In addition to its practical value for teachers, the interface will serve as a research platform for systematic experimentation. It will enable researchers to explore different robot roles, interaction strategies, and levels of autonomy, while collecting data to inform iterative design and evaluation. This dual focus ensures both scientific relevance and technical feasibility. The proposed work will generate high societal and educational impact by lowering the entry barrier for integrating social robots into classrooms and by supporting inclusive, socially oriented learning activities. Furthermore, the interface will constitute a foundational research infrastructure for future projects, including a planned SNSF proposal, positioning this work as a strategic stepping stone toward larger-scale research on social robots in education.