Over the weekend I had a group of friends at my house. They were mainly college aged students, 2 girls, and 6 boys. A few of the boys were also engineering students so they understood the concept of robotics, but didn’t immediately associate a toy-looking dinosaur as a robot. Everyone’s initial reaction was that they were intrigued, mainly because they’d never seen a Pleo. After initially seeing and playing with the Pleo and seeing what all it could do they seemed to lose interest relatively fast. The girls reaction, which differed from the boys, was that they had a more deep connection, calling the Pleo cute, and having more feelings for it (feeling sympathy for it when it was help upside-down by the tail). My conclusion from this was that I feel little kids could spend more time with the Pleo without getting bored, or wanting to move on to a new task. Maybe if the Pleo was programmed to do more things, older kids would spend more time with it, however this is just a hypothesis. Furthermore, I feel that girls have a more caring connection to the Pleo, worrying about its well being and feeling hurt when the Pleo gets upset.
