Development of Educational System with the Android Robot SAYA and Evaluation

Abstract

This chapter describes an educational system with a tele-operated android robot, named SAYA, that can express human-like facial expressions and perform some communicative functions with its head and eye movements, and it is utilized as a role of a teacher. Two kinds of field experiments were conducted to investigate effectiveness of this educational system in actual educational fields. An experiment was conducted at both an elementary school and a university to estimate age-dependent differences of its effectiveness. The other experiment was carried out to verify whether children's interest, motivation, and concentration to the class, and science and technologies were enhanced.