Our paper entitled “Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor” received an honorable mentioning from SIGCHI at the CHI2010 conference. This means that our paper has been within the top 5 percent of all full papers. Here is the abstract:
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.
Reference:
Saerbeck, M., & Bartneck, C. (2010). Expressive robots in education – Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2010), Atlanta. | DOI: 10.1145/1753326.1753567
