2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The State of Robotics Ethics Education: A WIP Site Analysis

Presented at Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE) Poster Session

This work-in-progress paper details a foundational assessment of three separate robotics education sites to create a foundation for further understanding needs around robotics education. Robotics is a rapidly emerging field and robotics education needs to grow and develop with the needs of students and researchers being educated and trained in these spaces. Furthermore, as robots become increasingly integrated into communities, there is also an important need to embed social justice principles into robotics education. To optimize our approach to robotics education, it is critical to first understand the current domains and education approaches that are emerging in sites where robotics education is occurring.

This paper supports the need for further understanding of the current state of robotics education by conducting a preliminary analysis of three sites that all host robotics (or robotics-related) educational programs. The three sites each offer a different level of student focus. Site A is an undergraduate robotics program at a University in Sweden. Site B is a graduate robotics program at a public university in Colorado, and Site C is a K-12 focused program affiliated with a public institution in California. This paper will further detail the additional variation in robotics educational approaches, including student demographics, instructional practices, and existing approaches to social justice integration.

This foundational work is part of a larger project focused on identifying robotics education needs around infusing ethics and social justice instruction into the curriculum. Over the next year, we will be conducting further analyses through interviews and focus groups in order to commence with creating supportive instructional materials to help educators bring ethics and social justice into robotics curriculum at all levels. This paper aims to introduce and share this work with the community of educators in computer and electrical engineering spaces who might also be interested in contributing to our understanding of the current state and needs around robotics ethics education.

Authors

Yifei Zhu Colorado School of Mines [biography]

I'm a PhD candidate in robotics at the Colorado School of Mines. I have an interdisciplinary focus on human–robot interaction, where I use mixed-methods approaches to design robot interaction and communication. I also study how emerging technologies such as robots are designed, deployed, and understood within broader social contexts.
Dr. Alison J Kerr Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Alison J. Kerr has a doctoral degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from The University of Tulsa. Dr. Kerr's research interests include training development and evaluation as explored across a variety of academic disciplines and organizational se
Dr. Tom Williams Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Tom Williams is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, Director of the MIRRORLab, and author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (2025).

Tom earned joint PhDs in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University, and is an internationally recognized scholar of Human-Robot Interaction whose work examines cognitive, social, and moral dimensions of Human-Robot Interaction.

Tom is the winner of Early Career awards from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and NASA.
Dr. Juan C. Lucena Colorado School of Mines [biography]

Juan Lucena is Professor and Director of Humanitarian Engineering Undergraduate Programs at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). Juan obtained a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Virginia Tech and a MS in STS and BS in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering fro
Dr. Katie Winkle Uppsala University [biography]

Katie Winkle is an assistant professor at the Department for Information Technology at Uppsala University. She previously held a Digital Futures postdoctoral fellowship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and completed her PhD in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Her research sits at the intersection of robotics, design, and the social sciences to tackle technical and societal challenges relating to human-machine interaction. Her award-winning work on feminist human-robot interaction has gained significant attention within the field and is helping to define new, critical directions of research on the design of robots and their interaction behaviours.
Tiera Tanksley University of California, Los Angeles [biography]

Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher in education and information studies at UCLA’s Center for Resilience and Digital Justice. Her scholarship, which theorizes a critical race technology theory (CRTT) in education, extends conventional education research to include socio-technical and techno-structural analyses of AI and EdTech. Specifically, her research examines anti-Blackness as “the default setting” and “organizing logic” of both schools and school-based technologies, and analyzes the socio-emotional, mental health and academic ramifications of algorithmic racism in the lives and schooling experiences of Black youth. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with digital technologies that they encounter both within and beyond the classroom context.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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