Affect of Robot’s Competencies on Children’s Perception

The focus of the research described in this paper is to explore children’s perception of a social robot’s learning abilities and behavior in an educational context. With this purpose, we conducted a long-term study with children in a school by adopting the learning-by-teaching learning method. The scenario involves a ”learner-agent” (a robot) which seeks help from a child (a teacher) in correcting the shapes of a few letters it writes. Two versions of the robot were built: one where it learns and another where it does not improve over time. The results of the study suggest that children’s social relationship with the robot was not affected by the learning abilities of the agent.