Abstract
In the design of educational robots, it appears to be undecided as to whether robots should show social behaviors and look human-like or whether such cues are insignificant for learning. We conducted an experiment with different designs of social robots built from the same materials, which is unique in robotics research. The robots rehearsed multiplication tables with primary school children in Hong Kong, which is a user group not easily or often accessed. The results show that affective bonding tendencies may occur but did not significantly contribute to the learning progress of these children, which was perhaps due to the short interaction period. Nonetheless, 5 min of robot tutoring improved their scores by about 30%, while performance dropped only for a few challenged children. We discuss topics, such as teaching language skills, which may be fostered by human likeness in appearance and behaviors; however, for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-related subjects, the social aspects of robots hardly seem to matter.
Highlights
Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, learners worldwide have come to rely on online teaching and media applications for their education
Before entering the main analysis, in order to examine our hypotheses, we ran a number of preliminary tests to validate our manipulation and monitor confounding variables, the statistical details of which can be found in the Technical Report of Supplementary Materials
The weakest students that gained from robot tutoring did so in percentage of gain (90%), not in absolute numbers, compared to their earlier achievements (significant t-tests for percent learning gain only with inclusion of Challenged students: t(33) = 3.68, p = 0.001; t(27) = 4.69, p = 0.000; t(18) = 3.73, p = 0.002
Summary
Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, learners worldwide have come to rely on online teaching and media applications for their education. A few years ago, robot teachers were mere science fiction; at present, a number of schools have come to include some form of robot education. This varies from educational programs such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), in which young children learn to build and program robots (see, e.g., [2,3]), to humanoids that teach children mathematics or language (see, e.g., [4,5]). A recent review has pointed out that the appearance, behavior, and different kinds of social roles of the robot may positively (or negatively) affect learning outcomes [6]
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