Learning with or from the Robot: Exploring Robot Roles in Educational Context with Children

摘要

The goal of this ongoing research is to examine the feasibility of using a social humanoid robot to teach children the basics of programming. We focus on exploring robot's adaptive strategies in order to facilitate both effective educational applications and engaging child-robot interaction. In this paper we present our preliminary work, which explores robot's social roles (peer versus teacher) and their effect on learning. The child needs to learn the basics of programming in order to walk the robot through the maze via drag-and-drop instructions on the tablet screen. The findings suggest that children complete the task much quicker with the peer robot while a teacher robot is shown to be more effective for learning.