Students participate and evaluate the design and development of a social robot

Abstract

Scholars have highlighted the importance of the humanoid appearance and the integration of various social cues for the design of Socially Assistive Robots for Education (SAR). However, designing a SAR for education omitting the stakeholders that will exploit it might prove a risky task. The aim of the current study, on the one hand, was to present the design of a SAR for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education developed through stakeholders' involvement in various steps of the approach. On the other hand, the study aimed to present the evaluation of the prototype robot through a STEM-oriented robot-assisted collaborative online teaching-learning sequence. Preliminary results indicate that participants endorsed the appearance and non-verbal behavior of the robot above chance level, while gender and age-related differences were revealed regarding the most appealing feature of the robot. Implications for Human-Robot Interaction are discussed.