The symbiotic relationship between educational robotics and computer science in formal education

Educational Robotics (ER) has the potential to provide significant benefits to edu-cation, provided an increase in outreach by transitioning from the extra-curricular initiatives in which ER has thrived to formal education. As Computer Science (CS) Education is undergoing curricular reforms worldwide, the present study addresses the case of a Digital Education reform that included ER as a means to teach core CS concepts. Approximately 350 teachers from the first four grades of primary school participated in a mandatory two-year continuing professional development (CPD) program. The first year of the program was dedicated to CS and introduced teach-ers to CS Unplugged (CSU) and Robotics Unplugged (RU) activities. As such, we analyse the interplay between these activities and focus on teachers’ voluntary adop-tion of the proposed content in classrooms. This is complemented by an analysis of their perception and recommendation of ER. The findings highlight three main points. Firstly, ER benefits from the integration in the CS CPD, as this provides the necessary traction to introduce ER into teacher practices (the teachers freely devoted 2275 h to ER activities in their classrooms, over two years). Secondly, the pres-ence of ER activities in the CS-CPD allows a higher proportion of teachers to adopt the CS content, as there are teachers that favour one type of activity over the other. Finally, the globally positive perception of ER registered in this study is relevant for two reasons: teachers were not voluntarily participating in the CPD, and results did not differ between pioneers and novices.

Bringing robotics into formal education using the Thymio open source hardware robot

Michael Bonani, Manon Aline Briod, Stéphane Magnenat, Francesco Mondada, Léa Marie Pereyre, Philippe Rétornaz, Fanny Riedo

Mobile robots are valuable tools for education because of both the enthusiasm they raise and the multidisciplinary nature of robotics technology. Mobile robots give access to a wide range of fields, such as complex mechanics, sensors, wireless transmission, mathematics, and computer science. However, despite their potential as educational tools, robots are still not as widespread in schools as they could be. In this article, we identify five key reasons: lack of diversity, high cost, noninclusive design, lack of educational material, and lack of stability over time. Then, we describe our answers to these problems, as we implemented them in the Thymio project: a mature mass-produced open-hardware robot, at a low price, with a multiage and gender-neutral feature set, and with a design promoting creativity, facilitating learning, and providing a wide range of interaction possibilities from built-in behaviors to text programming, passing through different visual programming environments. We highlight some neglected key issues that differentiate open-source hardware from open-source software, for instance the legal uncertainty of designing open hardware using professional computer-aided design (CAD) tools and the difficulty to distribute the development. Our solution to these being to increase the awareness of CAD editors to open-source hardware and to provide a two-layer development model for hardware.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers2017

Learning How to Write with a Social Robot

Shruti Chandra

Learning handwriting is one of the main occupations for children in primary education. It is a complex skill that has been associated with children’s learning and development. Poor handwriting skills affect children negatively concerning their academic performance and motivation. In schools, children with handwriting problems need extra support and one-to-one interventions from teachers. Personalised one-to-one support requires additional resources that most schools generally cannot afford. Therefore, there is a need to explore different methods of learning and contemporary technologies to develop new educational tools to foster children’s learning process of handwriting. The research presented in this thesis addresses the question of - “How to create a social robot that can help children to acquire handwriting skills?". Thus, we looked into three different research domains: education; pedagogic sciences; and social human-robot interaction (HRI). On the one hand, we investigated the types of errors commonly present in children’s handwriting. On the other hand, we needed to explore different educational theories to find alternate learning methods that would maximise children’s learning gains. In addition, we investigated various possibilities for integrating a social robot into educational scenarios and measured its impact on the children’s learning process. This thesis presents five studies that follow an incremental evolution of the research. The first three studies were based on the interaction between two children, in the presence of either a human or a robotic facilitator, with the children performing a collaborative writing activity. We explored the ‘peer-learning’ and ‘peer-tutoring’ methods and compared the differences in terms of interaction behaviour and learning gains. Further, we analysed children’s interpersonal distance and feelings of responsibility towards their peers, both in the presence of a robot and human facilitator. Finally, we examined children’s assessment behaviour towards their peers and self-disclosure towards the robotic facilitator. The outcomes of these first studies provided enough data to generate a taxonomy of children handwriting errors to be used in the subsequent studies. They hinted that the ‘peer-tutoring’ method had a positive influence on children’s learning and corrective feedback to their peers in the presence of the social robot, providing positive support to the applicability of social robots as ‘facilitators’ in handwriting learning. The next step was to study the effects of the robot in the peer-tutoring scenario when assuming the role of a peer, directly interacting and performing a collaborative writing activity with the children. Thus, we developed an educational system with an autonomous social behaviour of a robot exhibiting various levels of learning competencies. The tutor-child provides corrective feedback on the writing of the learner-robot and in turn, enhances his writing skills. The robot’s writing was generated by an algorithm incorporating human-inspired movements and could reproduce a set of writing errors from the error taxonomy. We tested the system by conducting two longitudinal studies, each of them composed of four sessions. In the fourth study, we assigned the robot two contrasting competencies: ‘learning’ and ‘non-learning’. We measured the differences in children’s learning gains and changes in their perceptions towards the learner-robot. The fifth study followed a similar interaction scenario and research questions, but this time the robot performed three learning competencies: ‘continuous-learning’;’non-learning’ and ‘personalised-learning’. The findings of these studies show that the children improved more with the robot exhibiting learning, continuous-learning and personalised-learning competencies compared to the robot showing non-learning competency. The way children’s learning and perception of the robot evolved over time confirmed the need for multiple sessions for the last two studies. This thesis presents some evidence that social robots can be successfully used as tools for enhancing children’s handwriting skills in peer-learning scenarios.

EPFL2019

Learning How to Write with a Social Robot

Shruti Chandra

EPFL2019