Towards the Design of Robots Inspired in Ancient Cultures as Educational Tools

The use of robots as educational tools has demonstrated to be highly effective for attracting students to science and technology related academic fields. Although these academic fields are very important, we believe that other subjects such as language, music, arts, literature, history, etc., are also essential for future generations. For this reason, the goal of this research is to explore the potential use of robots as educational tools for non-technology related fields such as history. We discuss an alternative approach for designing robots inspired in traits and characteristics of historical figures that play an important role in the topic to be studied. We provide several examples of conceptual designs of robots inspired in ancient gods or historical characters of Mesoamerican and South American cultures. We discuss how some of the traits of ancient gods and characters could serve as inspiration for the appearance design of commercial robots, and how these robots could be used in educational environments to attract the attention of students to learn about this history topic.