Social robots as skilled ignorant peers for supporting learning

When designing social robots for educational settings, there is often an
emphasis on domain knowledge. This presents challenges: 1) Either robots must
autonomously acquire domain knowledge, a currently unsolved problem in
HRI, or 2) the designers provide this knowledge implying re-programming the
robot for new contexts. Recent research explores alternative, relatively easier to
port, knowledge areas like student rapport, engagement, and synchrony though
these constructs are typically treated as the ultimate goals, when the final goal
should be students’ learning. Our aim is to propose a shift in how engagement
is considered, aligning it naturally with learning. We introduce the notion of a
skilled ignorant peer robot: a robot peer that has little to no domain knowledge
but possesses knowledge of student behaviours conducive to learning, i.e.,
behaviours indicative of productive engagement as extracted from student
behavioral profiles. We formally investigate how such a robot’s interventions
manipulate the children’s engagement conducive to learning. Specifically, we
evaluate two versions of the proposed robot, namely, Harry and Hermione,
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in a user study with 136 students where each version differs in terms of the
intervention strategy. Harry focuses on which suggestions to intervene with
from a pool of communication, exploration, and reflection inducing suggestions, while Hermione also carefully considers when and why to intervene. While the teams interacting with Harry have higher productive engagement correlated to learning, this engagement is not affected by the robot’s intervention scheme. In contrast, Hermione’s well-timed interventions, deemed more useful, correlate with productive engagement though engagement is not correlated to learning. These results highlight the potential of a social educational robot as a skilled ignorant peer and stress the importance of precisely timing the robot interventions in a learning environment to be able to manipulate moderating variable of interest such as productive engagement.