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Article published In:
Interaction Studies
Vol. 21:2 (2020) ► pp.220–242

“Robot, tell me a tale!”

A social robot as tool for teachers in kindergarten

| Sheffield Hallam University
| University of Catania
| University of Catania
| Sheffield Hallam University

Robots are versatile devices that are promising tools for supporting teaching and learning in the classroom or at home. In fact, robots can be engaging and motivating, especially for young children. This paper presents an experimental study with 81 kindergarten children on memorizations of two tales narrated by a humanoid robot. The variables of the study are the content of the tales (knowledge or emotional) and the different social behaviour of the narrators: static human, static robot, expressive human, and expressive robot. Results suggest a positive effect of the expressive behaviour in robot storytelling, whose effectiveness is comparable to a human with the same behaviour and better when compared with a static inexpressive human. Higher efficacy is achieved by the robot in the tale with knowledge content, while the limited capability to express emotions made the robot less effective in the tale with emotional content.

Keywords: educational robotics, human-robot interaction, kindergarten, social robotics, storytelling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work and hypotheses
    • 2.1Robots in education
    • 2.2Social robotics for children’s education
      • 2.2.1Storytelling with robots
      • 2.2.2Effect of robot’s gestures and other social cues
    • 2.3Hypotheses
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Experimental design & material
    • 3.3The Nao humanoid robotic platform
    • 3.4Classroom setting
    • 3.5Experimental procedure
    • 3.6Data analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 20 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18024.con
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