Introducing Roversa PetBot
Introducing Roversa PetBot
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What can a robot teach us about scientific investigation and digital wellbeing?
What can a robot teach us about scientific investigation and digital wellbeing?
The Roversa PetBot Project turns Roversa into a Tamagotchi-style digital pet that students can observe, investigate, modify, and redesign. Using a Use–Modify–Create learning sequence, students explore how digital systems influence attention, emotions, relationships, and choices.
Through hands-on investigations, students practice isolating variables, identifying cause-and-effect relationships, investigating system optimization, and analyzing how different parts of a system interact. PetBot provides a playful, tangible way to connect scientific investigation, computational thinking, systems thinking, and digital wellbeing.
Students run Roversa PetBot’s pre-made program to observe how the robot responds to different activity buttons.
Students modify the pre-made PetBot code to update how the robot's wellbeing responds to the activity buttons.
Students design their own PetBot activity button and associated wellbeing response.
Research Behind the Project
Research Behind the Project
Roversa PetBot grew out of a collaborative research project with the University of Virginia’s Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment (TYDE) initiative and School of Education and Human Development.
The research explores:
How PetBot supports student wellbeing, digital literacy, and empowerment.
How PetBot can be effectively integrated into classrooms and support educators in promoting youth wellbeing.
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