Reading socially: Transforming the in-home reading experience with a learning-companion robot
Reading socially: Transforming the in-home reading experience with a learning-companion robot
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DOI：
10.1126/scirobotics.aat5999
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发表时间：
2018-08-22
期刊：
影响因子：
25
通讯作者：
Mutlu, Bilge
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Michaelis, Joseph E.;Mutlu, Bilge
社交机器人作为儿童的同伴和同伴学习者有着广阔的前景，但人们对如何为这一人群最好地设计它们、哪些交互场景可以从它们的使用中受益以及它们如何适应学习活动和环境知之甚少。我们的目标是通过设计一个学习伴侣机器人来增强引导阅读活动，并检查机器人对家庭阅读体验的影响，从而缩小这一差距。在本文中，我们比较了 10 至 12 岁青春期早期儿童 (N = 24) 在为期两周的家庭实地研究中通过学习伴侣机器人或纸质活动完成引导阅读活动的经历。我们发现两种情况下的阅读频率和持续时间相似，并且两种引导阅读活动都被描述为有助于培养阅读技能和维持参与度的积极体验。与学习伴侣机器人一起阅读的孩子进一步报告说，这些活动支持阅读理解并激励他们阅读，并表明与机器人加深了社会联系（即陪伴或归属）。我们的结论是，我们的简单原型社交机器人并没有因为新奇效应而导致活动下降，而是能够保留现有家庭学习活动的好处，同时将阅读体验转变为有价值的社交体验。我们的研究结果有助于理解随着机器人越来越广泛地为公众所使用，我们如何利用社交机器人作为变革性学习工具的能力。
Social robots hold great promise as companions and peer learners for children, yet little is known about how they can be best designed for this population, what interaction scenarios can benefit from their use, and how they might fit into learning activities and environments. We aimed to close this gap by designing a learning-companion robot to augment guided reading activity and examined the robot's impact on an in-home reading experience. In this paper, we compared the experiences of early adolescent children aged 10 to 12 years (N = 24) who completed guided reading activities either with a learning-companion robot or as a paper-based activity in a 2-week-long, in-home field study. We found similar reading frequency and duration in both conditions and that both guided reading activities were described as positive experiences that helped to build reading skill and to sustain engagement. Children who read with the learning-companion robot further reported that the activities supported reading comprehension and motivated them to read and indicated a deepening social connection (i.e., companionship or affiliation) with the robot. We conclude that, rather than the activity falling off after a novelty effect, our simple prototype social robot is capable of preserving the benefits of an existing in-home learning activity while transforming the reading experience into a valuable, social one. Our findings contribute to an understanding of how we might capitalize on the capacity of social robots to serve as a transformative learning tool as robots become more widely available to the public.