Children's social interactions within a socioenactive scenario

Abstract

New ubiquitous technologies and interaction paradigms can play a key role in facilitating social interaction processes among children. A class of systems named “enactive” aims to support fluid interaction between technology and people via feedback cycles — the effect of technology on the human agent is fed back by the human action on the technology — based on the use of data sensors. We have extended this concept in a long-term project on socioenactive systems, by emphasizing social aspects in the enactive phenomena. In this article, we investigate how a robot-based experience can promote social behavior among children in an educational context. The study was conducted in workshops with 26 children (4–5 years old), organized in two groups. The system scenario used a narrative based on an adaptation of the Little Red Riding Hood tale to investigate children's interaction in playing embodied-based situations. Data captured from video-recorded workshop sessions were analyzed post hoc using the Grounded Theory methods. In total, 26 interaction coding were identified, with a high interrater reliability assessed by Cohen's Kappa (k = 0.84). Our findings indicate that 50.5% of the children's actions were the result of children-children and group-robot interactions, compared to the 38% of children interacting individually with the robot. This indicates children's high degree of embodied peer collaboration and initiative to accomplish the tasks in the proposed scenario. These results contribute to inform the design and construction of future socioenactive systems.