The difference of excellence in educational-support robots affects children's learning english vocabularies

Abstract

In case of educational support using a partner robot, its individual robot character is considered to play an important role. Based on this consideration, we focus on the excellence property of the robot, assuming that the difference of robot excellence affects the performance of a human learner who joins a learning activity together with the robot. In this paper, we report on a field experiment that was conducted at an English learning school for Japanese children (4--8 years of age). We divided 19 participants into three experimental conditions in which we introduced a small humanoid robot with three different excellence levels one for each condition: Condition A robot was designed to be with the highest excellence level. The robot could answer to any question given by a human teacher correctly. In contrast, Condition B robot could not answer correctly at the beginning but could learn from partner humans who could take the robot by the hand and teach it step by step. Finally, Condition C robot was designed to be with the lowest excellence level. Condition C robot could neither answer to any question from beginning nor learn from partner humans. Experimental results showed that the learning performance of participants who joined a drawing-game lesson for English names of various shapes together with Condition A or Condition B robot was more increased than the case with Condition C robot. In addition, Condition B and Condition C robots were found to be more effective in motivating participants in the learning activity. Those findings would be valuable for a better future design of a partner robot whose goal is to enrich and support educational activities in classrooms. © 2013 JSAI (The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence).