The Effect of a Robot’s Social Character on Children’s Task Engagement: Peer Versus Tutor

An increasing number of applications for social robots focuses on learning and playing with children. One of the unanswered questions is what kind of social character a robot should have in order to positively engage children in a task. In this paper, we present a study on the effect of two differen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial Robotics pp. 704 - 713
Main Authors Zaga, Cristina, Lohse, Manja, Truong, Khiet P., Evers, Vanessa
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Cham Springer International Publishing 01.01.2015
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Child-Robot Interaction
Robot behaviors
Robot characters
Task engagement
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Summary:An increasing number of applications for social robots focuses on learning and playing with children. One of the unanswered questions is what kind of social character a robot should have in order to positively engage children in a task. In this paper, we present a study on the effect of two different social characters of a robot (peer vs. tutor) on children’s task engagement. We derived peer and tutor robot behaviors from the literature and we evaluated the two robot characters in a WoZ study where 10 pairs of children aged 6 to 9 played Tangram puzzles with a Nao robot. Our results show that in the peer character condition, children paid attention to the robot and the task for a longer period of time and solved the puzzles quicker and better than in the tutor character condition.
ISBN:3319255533
9783319255538
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_70