Efficacy of a ‘Misconceiving’ Robot to Improve Computational Thinking in a Collaborative Problem Solving Activity: A Pilot Study

Robot-mediated learning activities are often designed as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives. Although miscommunications and misunderstandings occur frequently, humans, unlike robots, are very good at overcoming them and converging to a shared solution. With the aim of equipping a robot with these abilities and exploring its effects, in this article we investigate how can a humanoid robot collaborate with a human learner to construct a shared solution to a problem via suggesting actions and (dis)agreeing with each other. Concretely, we designed a learning activity aiming to improve the computational thinking skills of children, in which the robot makes suggestions on what to do, that may be in line with what the human thinks or not. Furthermore, the robot may suggest wrong actions that could essentially prevent them from finding a correct solution. Via a pilot study conducted remotely with 9 school children, we investigate whether the interaction results in positive learning outcomes, how does the collaboration evolve, and how these relate to each other. The results show positive learning outcomes for the participants in terms of finding better solutions, suggesting that the collaboration with the robot might have helped trigger the learning mechanisms.