Learning By Collaborative Teaching: An Engaging Multi-Party CoWriter Activity

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a novel and engaging collaborative learning activity for handwriting where a group of participants simultaneously tutor a Nao robot. This activity was intended to take advantage of both collaborative learning and the learning by teaching paradigm to improve children's meta-cognition (perception of their own skills). Multiple engagement probes were integrated into the activity as a first step towards fostering long term interactions. As a lot of research targets social interactions, the goal here was to determine whether an engagement strategy focused on the task could be as, or more efficient than one focused on social interactions and participants' introspection. To that effect, two engagement strategies were implemented. They differed in content but used the same multi-modal design in order to increase participants' meta-cognitive reflection, once on the task and performances, and once on participants' enjoyment and emotions. Both strategies were compared to a baseline by probing and assessing engagement at the individual and group level, along the behavioural, emotional and cognitive dimensions, in a between subject experiment with 12 groups of children. The experiments showed that the collaborative task pushed the children to adapt their manner of writing to the group, even though the adopted solution was not always correct. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the strategies in terms of behaviour on task (behavioural engagement), satisfaction (emotional engagement) or performance (cognitive engagement) as the group dynamics had a stronger impact on the outcome of the collaborative teaching task. Therefore, the task and social engagement strategies can be considered as efficient in the context of collaboration.

When Positive Perception of the Robot Has No Effect on Learning

“…For instance, a robot equipped with emphatic competencies was used to support the interactions of a collaborative learning activity about sustainable development through constructing a sustainable city in a group setting by considering the affective states of the participants [17]. Within a learningby-teaching paradigm [18], robots were used to promote children's responsibility in a collaborative learning activity in which children write on a tablet and robot gives corrective feedback on it [19], to aid the reading of children where a child and a robot collaboratively read stories [15], and to be tutored by children collaboratively in order to improve handwriting [5].…”

“…A. Learning Task Design 1) Swiss Gold Mines Scenario: The objective of the JUS-Think activity is to give participants an intuitive knowledge about minimum-spanning-tree problems 5 and how to solve them. To introduce the minimum-spanning-tree problem to the participants as a game and with minimal terminology, we created a scenario based on a map of Switzerland.…”

“…The words of Stephen Wolfram 3 capture the urgency seen in the efforts to introduce CT in educational curricula before high school [1]. At the same time, the potential of robots is increasingly being explored in educational settings across the globe, under the intuition that robots could be an effective tool for advancing CT skills [2], as well as for increasing participants' engagement with the educational activity [3] and collaboration [4], [5]. However, crafting pedagogical designs and robot interventions that *The first two authors contributed equally to this work.…”

AlloHaptic: Robot-Mediated Haptic Collaboration for Learning Linear Functions

“…Two approaches can be found in the literature concerning the way the robot should facilitate collaboration among learners. Explicit solutions typically envision a social robot to act as an instructor or peer for the learners, and rely on its behaviour to promote collaboration [3], [4], [5]. Conversely, *This work has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics.…”

Editorial: Robot-Assisted Learning and Education

“…Robots are increasingly being introduced in social environments to support the process of learning (e.g., Atmatzidou and Demetriadis, 2016 ; El Hamamsy et al, 2019 ; Kory-Westlund and Breazeal, 2019 ; Vogt et al, 2019 ) with different roles, such as smart teaching platforms, assistants, and in some cases also as companions and co-learners (Brown and Howard, 2014 ; Gordon et al, 2015 ; Pandey and Gelin, 2016 ; Belpaeme et al, 2018 ). Empirical research in educational robotics (ER) focuses on the adaptation of the robot behavior to specific learning needs and assessment of student learning and understanding.…”