Expressive robots in education: varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor

Teaching is inherently a social interaction between teacher and student. Despite this knowledge, many educational tools, such as vocabulary training programs, still model the interaction in a tutoring scenario as unidirectional knowledge transfer rather than a social dialog. Therefore, ongoing research aims to develop virtual agents as more appropriate media in education. Virtual agents can induce the perception of a life-like social interaction partner that communicates through natural modalities such as speech, gestures and emotional expressions. This effect can be additionally enhanced with a physical robotic embodiment. This paper presents the development of social supportive behaviors for a robotic tutor to be used in a language learning application. The effect of these behaviors on the learning performance of students was evaluated. The results support that employing social supportive behavior increases learning efficiency of students. Author Keywords Social interaction, Educati...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Martin Saerbeck, Tom Schut, Christoph Bartneck, Maddy D. Janse
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Human Computer Interaction, Life-like Social Interaction, Social Interaction, Social Supportive Behavior