A Piece of Theatre: Investigating How Teachers Design LLM Chatbots to Assist Adolescent Cyberbullying Education
This work addresses the problem of scaling personalized cyberbullying education for adolescents, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to a new domain.
The researchers tackled the challenge of implementing chatbots for cyberbullying education by creating a no-code design tool for K-12 teachers, which was enthusiastically welcomed and enabled teachers to act as 'playwrights' guiding student interactions in a safe environment.
Cyberbullying harms teenagers' mental health, and teaching them upstanding intervention is crucial. Wizard-of-Oz studies show chatbots can scale up personalized and interactive cyberbullying education, but implementing such chatbots is a challenging and delicate task. We created a no-code chatbot design tool for K-12 teachers. Using large language models and prompt chaining, our tool allows teachers to prototype bespoke dialogue flows and chatbot utterances. In offering this tool, we explore teachers' distinctive needs when designing chatbots to assist their teaching, and how chatbot design tools might better support them. Our findings reveal that teachers welcome the tool enthusiastically. Moreover, they see themselves as playwrights guiding both the students' and the chatbot's behaviors, while allowing for some improvisation. Their goal is to enable students to rehearse both desirable and undesirable reactions to cyberbullying in a safe environment. We discuss the design opportunities LLM-Chains offer for empowering teachers and the research opportunities this work opens up.