Robots are increasingly being studied for use in education. It is expected that robots will have the potential to facilitate children's learning and function autonomously within real classrooms in the near future. Previous research has raised the importance of designing acceptable robots for different practices. In parallel, scholars have raised ethical concerns surrounding children interacting with robots. Drawing on a Responsible Research and Innovation perspective, our goal is to move away from research concerned with designing features that will render robots more socially acceptable by end users toward a reflective dialogue whose goal is to consider the key ethical issues and long-term consequences of implementing classroom robots for teachers and children in primary education. This paper presents the results from several focus groups conducted with teachers in three European countries. Through a thematic analysis, we provide a theoretical account of teachers' perspectives on classroom robots pertaining to privacy, robot role, effects on children and responsibility. Implications for the field of educational robotics are discussed. KeywordsEducational robots, Social implications, Ethics, Teachers' perspectives, Thematic analysis, Focus group AcknowledgmentsWe would first of all like to thank all the teachers and students who took part in the studies. We would also like to extend our gratitude to teacher education students Rebecka Olofsson and Trixie Assarsson for their excellent video editing. We thank Tiago Ribeiro, Eugenio Di Tullio, Etienne Roesch and Daniel Gooch for facilitating some of the focus groups. We would also like to thank master student Thomas Rider for his initial transcription services and ideas. We also thank the MUL group at the University of Gothenburg for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. This work was partially supported by the European Commission (EC) and was funded by the EU FP7 ICT-317923 project EMOTE (www.emote-project.eu). P. Alves-Oliveira acknowledges a FCT grant ref. SFRH/BD/110223/2015. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this publication. It does not represent the opinion of the EC, and the EC is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.We recommend you cite the published version. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx
In this paper, we describe the results of an interview study conducted across several European countries on teachers' views on the use of empathic robotic tutors in the classroom. The main goals of the study were to elicit teachers' thoughts on the integration of the robotic tutors in the daily school practice, understanding the main roles that these robots could play and gather teachers' main concerns about this type of technology. Teachers' concerns were much related to the fairness of access to the technology, robustness of the robot in students' hands and disruption of other classroom activities. They saw a role for the tutor in acting as an engaging tool for all, preferably in groups, and gathering information about students' learning progress without taking over the teachers' responsibility for the actual assessment. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to teacher acceptance of ubiquitous technologies in general and robots in particular.
This paper explores children's social engagement to a robotic tutor by analyzing their behavioral reactions to socially significant events initiated by the robot. Specific questions addressed in this paper are whether children express signs of social engagement as a reaction to such events, and if so, in what way. The second question is whether these reactions differ between different types of social events, and finally, whether such reactions disappear or change over time. Our analysis indicates that children indeed show behaviors that indicate social engagement using a range of communicative channels. While gaze towards the robot's face is the most common indication for all types of social events, verbal expressions and nods are especially common for questions, and smiles are most common after positive feedback. Although social responses in general decrease slightly over time, they are still observable after three sessions with the robot.
This paper presents a study that compares a humanoid robotic tutor to a human tutor when instructing school children to build a LEGO house. A total of 27 students, between the ages of 11-15, divided into two groups, participated in the study and data were collected to investigate the participants' success rate, requests for help, engagement, and attitude change toward robots following the experiment. The results reveal that both groups are equally successful in executing the task. However, students ask the human tutor more often for help, while students working with the robotic tutor are more eager to perform well on the task. Finally, all students get a more positive attitude toward a robotic tutor following the experiment, but those in the robot condition change their attitude somewhat more for certain questions, illustrating the importance of real interaction experiences prior to eliciting students' attitudes toward robots. The paper concludes that students do follow instructions from a robotic tutor but that more long-term interaction is necessary to study lasting effects.
Today, robots are studied and expected to be used in a range of social roles within classrooms. Yet, due to a number of limitations in social robots, robot interactions should be expected to occasionally suffer from troublesome situations and breakdowns. In this paper, we explore this issue by studying how children handle interaction trouble with a robot tutee in a classroom setting. The findings have implications not only for the design of robots, but also for evaluating their benefit in, and for, educational contexts. In this study, we conducted video analysis of children's group interactions with a robot tutee in a classroom setting, in order to explore the nature of these troubles in the wild. Within each group, children took turns acting as the primary interaction partner for the robot within the context of a mathematics game. Specifically, we examined what types of situations constitute trouble in these child-robot interactions, the strategies that individual children employ to cope with this trouble, as well as the strategies employed by other actors witnessing the trouble. By means of Interaction Analysis, we studied the video recordings of nine group interaction sessions (n = 33 children) in primary school grades 2 and 4. We found that sources of trouble related to the robot's social norm violations, which could be either active or passive. In terms of strategies, the children either persisted in their attempts at interacting with the robot by adapting their behavior in different ways, distanced themselves from the robot, or sought the help of present adults (i.e., a researcher in a teacher role, or an experimenter) or their peers (i.e., the child's classmates in each group). In terms of the witnessing actors, they addressed the trouble by providing guidance directed at the child interacting with the robot, or by intervening in the interaction. These findings reveal the unspoken rules by which children orient toward social robots, the complexities of child-robot interaction in the wild, and provide insights on children's perspectives and expectations of social robots in classroom contexts.
In this paper, we discuss opportunities and challenges for technology development and adoption in public libraries. The results are based on a multi-site comparative study and thematic analysis of ethnographic work in three libraries, each in a different European country. The results explore the sociotechnical practices, understandings, and perspectives of library staff and patrons when it comes to the role(s) and function(s) of libraries today. The contributions, which aim at informing the design and implementation of new digital services in public libraries, are twofold. Firstly, the main findings from the study is presented under six themes. Secondly, a list of key opportunities and challenges focusing on 1) media and technology literacy, 2) institutional transformation and technical infrastructures, 3) resource constraints among library staff, and 4) a shift in focus towards supporting activities.
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