Design students in higher education often lack hands-on understanding and tools for designing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). While many commercially available educational robot platforms require users to have extensive training or prior experience, we developed ADA, an entry-level robot prototyping platform, for design students without any previous background in robotics and programming to better explore and conceptualize HRI design concepts in the early stages of design processes. This paper reports on the design and development of AIDA, along with our pedagogical reflections on its implementation with bodystorming techniques in an interaction design course over the past two years. Our findings show that using AIDA with bodystorming enabled students to rapidly prototype HRI concepts by tinkering with available materials, generate design concepts in situated contexts, and foresee potential unintended HRI consequences from a user’s perspective. For platforms with similar goals, our study suggests that hardware and software accessibility is important for designers to easily conduct HRI concept exploration and prototyping. The tinkerability of the platform proves handy particularly when used in bodystorming for designers to identify interaction problems and rapidly prototype and test solutions. The in-situ perspective, where designers “become the robot” and dynamically switch between the roles of user and robot, facilitates a tacit understanding of what robots can and cannot do when interacting with users in their activities.