Designing a Social Robot to Support Children’s Inquiry Learning: A Contextual Analysis of Children Working Together at School

Abstract

Designers of educational interventions are always looking for methods to improve the learning experience of children. More and more, designers look towards robots and other social agents as viable educational tools. To gain inspiration for the design of meaningful behaviours for such educational social robots we conducted a contextual analysis. We observed a total of 22 primary school children working in pairs on a collaborative inquiry learning assignment in a real world situation at school. During content analysis we identified a rich repertoire of social interactions and behaviours, which we aligned along three types of interaction: (1) Educational, (2) Collaborational, and (3) Relational. From the results of our contextual analysis we derived four generic high-level recommendations and fourteen concrete design guidelines for when and how a social robot may have a meaningful contribution to the learning process. Finally, we present four variants of our Computer Aided Learning system in which we translated our design guidelines into concrete robot behaviours.

Now We’re Talking

“…The same audio recordings were played through the same wireless speaker that was now attached to the back of the robot. The behavior design of the robot was informed by design guidelines emerging from an extensive contextual analysis of inquiry learning tasks with our target user group [Davison et al 2019]. While the child interacted with the robot and the learning task, the robot displayed the following behaviors: (1) Facial expressions: When children progressed through assignments the robot showed happy expressions, and directly after children performed the inquiry experiment the robot showed an amazed expression; (2) Interactive gaze: The robot gazed toward the child when speaking, the robot gazed toward the tablet when the child pressed a button or when a task appeared, and the robot gazed toward the learning materials when the objects were being manipulated; and (3) Lifelike behaviors: The robot blinked at random intervals, and lip-synchronization was added to give the impression that the robot was speaking.…”

“…Furthermore, the design guidelines that followed from our contextual analysis suggested how the robot should be introduced to children [Davison et al 2019]. The robot was introduced to the children as a peer but with well-developed inquiry skills (i.e., he knew how to perform the inquiry task, but did not know the correct answers yet).…”

Words of encouragement: how praise delivered by a social robot changes children’s mindset for learning

“…The robot's multimodal behaviours in this study were informed by design guidelines emerging from an extensive contextual analysis of inquiry learning tasks with our tar- get user group [16]. The robot used expressions for smiling when addressing the child and delivering praise, and amazement when the child performed the experimentation step of the task (for example, see Fig.…”

Working with a Social Robot in School

“…The learning tasks were constructed according to principles of inquiry learning to support a scientific process of discovery [19,20]. In the first task, adapted from our earlier work [9,42], children used a balance scale to explore the moment of force. They placed combinations of three differently weighted pots on three distances from a central fulcrum to discover how those variables affected the tilt of the balance.…”

“…The core system would continue to operate as best as possible in the event of a malfunctioning module, which would then be automatically restarted at an appropriate point in the interaction. [9]. The generated BML was sent to ASAPRealizer [31], which further orchestrated the scheduling, planning, and execution of the behaviours; the system's speech was generated using the Fluency 3 text-to-speech (TTS) engine.…”