Abstract
Browsing the literature shows that an increasing number of authors choose to use the learning by teaching approach in the field of educational robotics. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to produce a review of articles describing the effects of this approach on learning and, on the other hand, to review the literature in order to explore the characteristics at the core of this approach. We will only focus on the work using a humanoid robot. The areas of learning studied are writing, reading, vocabulary, and reasoning, but also there are some metacognitive abilities like task commitment and mental state attribution. Their targets are from very young children to preadolescents. We can already notice some studies on pupils with special educational needs. In all of these domains, the results show a nonnegligible effect of learning by teaching both on learning and on metacognitive abilities. If the concept of learning by teaching is clear, a careful investigation of the different studies shows that experimental paradigms do not use the same basic characteristics. For some, it is the robot’s weakness, the care that must be given to it, which is the main requirement for the approach, while for others it is the unbalanced distribution of knowledge which is at the heart of it. The learning by teaching approach we will study has two components: the robot and the child tutor. The characteristics of the robot and what is asked of the child to accomplish his or her task of the tutor will be analyzed.
Highlights
Teachings were on a great variety of areas such as reading [4], writing [6, 7, 10], language [5], reasoning [11, 12], and metacognitive abilities like commitment to a task and mental states attribution [13]. These studies concentrate on young children (3 to 6 years old) [5, 11, 12], children (7 to 8 years old) [4, 6], preteenagers (13 to 14 years old) [7], and adults [8, 14]
In the majority of these studies on learning by teaching, the robot used was NAO (Figure 1): a bipedal, humanoid robot of 58 cm, with 25 degrees of freedom, cameras, and vocal capacities, which can be programmed to carry out autonomously a set of tasks
We will be interested in the concept of learning by teaching by only focusing on the results of experimental studies in educational robotics which relies on the use of humanoid robots with children
Summary
“It is by teaching that men learn.” With this sentence, the Greek philosopher Seneca (4BC-65AC) lays the foundations, a bit less than 2000 years ago, of a new teaching method consisting in learning through the act of teaching. Teachings were on a great variety of areas such as reading [4], writing [6, 7, 10], language [5], reasoning [11, 12], and metacognitive abilities like commitment to a task and mental states attribution [13] These studies concentrate on young children (3 to 6 years old) [5, 11, 12], children (7 to 8 years old) [4, 6], preteenagers (13 to 14 years old) [7], and adults [8, 14]. In this review we will focus on studies with children
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