Comparing a Humanoid Tutor to a Human Tutor Delivering an Instructional Task to Children
Paper in proceeding, 2015

This paper presents a study that compares a humanoid robotic tutor to a human tutor when instructing school children to build a LEGO house. A total of 27 students, between the ages of 11-15, divided into two groups, participated in the study and data were collected to investigate the participants' success rate, requests for help, engagement, and attitude change toward robots following the experiment. The results reveal that both groups are equally successful in executing the task. However, students ask the human tutor more often for help, while students working with the robotic tutor are more eager to perform well on the task. Finally, all students get a more positive attitude toward a robotic tutor following the experiment, but those in the robot condition change their attitude somewhat more for certain questions, illustrating the importance of real interaction experiences prior to eliciting students' attitudes toward robots. The paper concludes that students do follow instructions from a robotic tutor but that more long-term interaction is necessary to study lasting effects.

Author

Sofia Serholt

University of Gothenburg

Christina Basedow

Jacobs University Bremen

Wolmet Barendregt

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Learning, Communication and IT

Mohammad Obaid

Chalmers, Applied Information Technology (Chalmers), Interaction design

2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots

1134-1141

14th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Humanoids 2014
Madrid, Spain,

Subject Categories

Didactics

Learning

Pedagogy

Human Computer Interaction

DOI

10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041511

More information

Latest update

10/7/2020