There is an increasing number of articles, web pages, robotic kits and other materials that are using the term Educational Robotics (ER) to refer to the use of robots in education, however the current definition of ER is still vague and open to misinterpretation. Therefore, anyone can claim that their work falls in the category of ER just because robots are involved. Despite all benefits of robotics, its incorrect use may be counterproductive. Therefore, the incremental use of the term ER is meaningless if it is not used correctly. Consequently, a concrete and precise definition of ER is required to support the development of it. This paper presents a first attempt to develop a concrete definition of ER, which describes all fields of study that constitutes it and how they are related between them. The definition is the result of the experience acquire during the participation of the European project Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM).

Sharing emotions and intentions is needed for effective interaction among humans, so it is for social robots acceptance, too. Theatre is an excellent framework to test whether a robot can play its social role, since many aspects are defined by script and director, and the development can focus on the most subtle and relevant features. An actor has to transmit emotions and intentions to a whole audience, therefore theatre is an excellent place to test whether a robot could convince that it is portraying a realistic character. In human theatre, people expect that actors show realistic characters that make audience to establish an empathic relation with them. If actors could not make the audience believe in the character, audience will lose any pleasure to continue looking the play. This realism is obtained by showing realistic human-human interactions. \ud The architecture presented in this paper aims to be the cornerstone to build a theatrical autonomous robot that could express emotions and intentions during a play. To accomplish this goal, the robot exploits a social model of the world to represent its character's feelings and belief about the world. Moreover, the concept of emotional state is used to add emotional features on actions that should be performed, according to the script and director's suggestions

Robots should be able to represent emotional states to interact with people as social agents. There are cases where robots cannot have bio-inspired bodies, for instance because the task to be performed requires a special shape, as in the case of home cleaners, package carriers, and many others. In these cases, emotional states have to be represented by exploiting movements of the body. In this paper, we present a set of case studies aimed at identifying specific values to convey emotion trough changes in linear and angular velocities, which might be applied on different non-anthropomorphic bodies. This work originates from some of the most considered emotion expression theories and from emotion coding for people. We show that people can recognize some emotional expressions better than others, and we propose some directions to express emotions exploiting only bio-neutral movement.

Although Robotics have been designed for education for several decades now, only recently they started being broadly used in education, formal and non formal. In this context many different technologies have emerged accompanied by relevant learning material and resources. Our observation is that the vast number of learning activities is driven by multiple "personal pedagogies" and thus it results in the fragmentation of the domain. To address this problem we discuss in the paper the construct of "activity plan template", a generic design tool that will facilitate different stakeholders (teachers, instructors, researchers) to design learning activities for different robotic toolkits. In the paper we discuss the characteristics of the activity plan template and the research process of generating such a template. Since we report work in progress, we present here the first version of the activity plan template, the construction of which is based on a set of best practices identified.

No abstract