| Title | When Positive Perception of the Robot Has No Effect on Learning |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2020 |
| Authors | Nasir, J., Norman, U., Bruno, B., Dillenbourg, P. |
| Conference Name | 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) |
| Keywords | Collaboration, collaborative problem solving, collaborative problem solving activity, Collaborative Work, computational thinking, computational thinking skills, computer aided instruction, Conferences, educational activities, educational robotics, Educational robots, educational settings, Engagement, groupware, human factors, human-robot interaction, Humanoid robots, IMI, intrinsic motivation inventory, JUSThink, learning metrics, mutual modelling, mutual understanding, Particle measurements, pedagogical HRI designs, personalised social behaviours, positive perception, pubcrawl, Resiliency, robot interventions, robot perception, robots, Scalability, Task Analysis, task engagement, work factor metrics |
| Abstract | Humanoid robots, with a focus on personalised social behaviours, are increasingly being deployed in educational settings to support learning. However, crafting pedagogical HRI designs and robot interventions that have a real, positive impact on participants' learning, as well as effectively measuring such impact, is still an open challenge. As a first effort in tackling the issue, in this paper we propose a novel robot-mediated, collaborative problem solving activity for school children, called JUSThink, aiming at improving their computational thinking skills. JUSThink will serve as a baseline and reference for investigating how the robot's behaviour can influence the engagement of the children with the activity, as well as their collaboration and mutual understanding while working on it. To this end, this first iteration aims at investigating (i) participants' engagement with the activity (Intrinsic Motivation Inventory-IMI), their mutual understanding (IMIlike) and perception of the robot (Godspeed Questionnaire); (ii) participants' performance during the activity, using several performance and learning metrics. We carried out an extensive user-study in two international schools in Switzerland, in which around 100 children participated in pairs in one-hour long interactions with the activity. Surprisingly, we observe that while a teams' performance significantly affects how team members evaluate their competence, mutual understanding and task engagement, it does not affect their perception of the robot and its helpfulness, a fact which highlights the need for baseline studies and multi-dimensional evaluation metrics when assessing the impact of robots in educational activities. |
| DOI | 10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223343 |
| Citation Key | nasir_when_2020 |
When Positive Perception of the Robot Has No Effect on Learning