Play-Testing REMind: Evaluating an Educational Robot-Mediated Role-Play Game

Synthesis: Sanoubari, Fernandes, Rebello, Pan, Houston, and Dautenhahn (2026) present REMind, an educational robot-mediated role-play game designed to support anti-bullying bystander intervention among children. REMind invites players to observe a bullying scenario enacted by social robots, reflect on the perspectives of the characters, and rehearse defending strategies by puppeteering a robotic avatar. Evaluated through a mixed-methods play-testing study with 18 children aged 9–10, the findings suggest the experience supported learning goals related to self-efficacy, perspective-taking, understanding outcomes of defending, and intervention strategies — highlighting Robot-Mediated Applied Drama (RMAD) as a novel pedagogical framework for social-emotional learning.

Key Findings

• REMind is an educational robot-mediated role-play game supporting anti-bullying bystander intervention among children.
• The game has players observe a bullying scenario enacted by social robots, reflect on character perspectives, and rehearse defending strategies by puppeteering a robotic avatar.
• A mixed-methods play-testing study with 18 children aged 9–10 evaluated the experience.
• Findings suggest the experience supported key learning goals: self-efficacy, perspective-taking, understanding outcomes of defending, and intervention strategies.
• The work highlights Robot-Mediated Applied Drama (RMAD) as a novel pedagogical framework to support social-emotional learning.

Study Design & Method

This is a mixed-methods play-testing study. The researchers designed REMind, an educational robot-mediated role-play game for anti-bullying bystander intervention, and evaluated it with 18 children aged 9–10. In the game, children observed bullying scenarios enacted by social robots, reflected on the perspectives of the characters, and rehearsed defending strategies by puppeteering a robotic avatar. Mixed-methods data collection assessed the experience's support for learning goals including self-efficacy, perspective-taking, understanding outcomes of defending, and intervention strategies.

What this means for practice

• Educators. Rehearse bystander intervention through embodied role-play rather than advice-giving: the 18 children who puppeteered the robotic avatar showed a significant pre-to-post gain in perceived Self-Efficacy for defending and better-calibrated beliefs about whether confronting a bully stops the bullying.
• Educators. Debrief the perspective of every character after the scene, since children's qualitative responses showed strong empathy with the victim and reasoning about the bystander's fear of retaliation and the bully's motivations.
• Designers. Keep the facilitator human: REMind's Joker should stay a drama educator's role because it carries the reflection and participation work of Forum Theatre, while the wizard who controls narrative flow is the part that should be automated.
• Designers. Plan for REMind's semi-autonomous, two-person Wizard-of-Oz facilitation and its specific robot hardware when scoping adoption, and build simplified teacher-facing controls such as clicker-based story progression for K-12 classrooms.

Limitations

The evaluation involved a small sample (18 children aged 9–10) in a play-testing context, limiting generalizability and evidence for sustained behavior change. The focus is on learning-goal support during the experience rather than long-term anti-bullying outcomes. The robot-mediated role-play setup requires specific hardware and facilitation.

Citation

Sanoubari, E., Fernandes, N., Rebello, K., Pan, A., Houston, A., & Dautenhahn, K. (2026). Play-testing REMind: Evaluating an educational robot-mediated role-play game.