Impact of Showing Robot Demonstration on Introducing Social Robotics Field to University Students

Abstract

Despite the social robotics’ potential to revolutionize human life, the field of social robotics has been less appealing and less popular than other robotics fields in both industrial and research domains. Therefore, many students are unfamiliar with this field. To expedite the development of the social robotics sector, numerous efforts must be made, including introducing students to the topic. In this study, we developed teaching materials and a procedure for introducing university students to the topic of social robotics. A robot demonstration was also utilized to provide participants with a more engaging experience and a deeper knowledge of the importance of social robotics. The ultimate objective of this paper is to provide a reference for lecturers and instructors in introducing social robots to students in the hope that they will become interested in the field, whether for the purposes of research or simply to learn more about this topic. We evaluated the proposed teaching materials and procedures for a small class size based on behavioral and subjective measurements. We also compared the outcome of presentations with and without a robot demonstration. In addition, we performed semi-structured interviews with 10 random participants who wanted to expand our qualitative analysis. Both presentations, with and without robot demonstration, successfully delivered the material. The experimental findings indicated that the robot demonstration had a significant impact on students’ satisfaction with the presentation and their desire to participate in similar presentations in the future.