Development of a learning support system with PaPeRo

Abstract

We propose a learning support system with a robot for asynchronous learning. The proposed system consists of a teacher, a user, a robot, a personal computer, an educational material, and a web camera. In asynchronous learning, the timing to provide the supports such as hints and answers in learning is one of important factors. Here, we endowed a robot with this roll on the timing estimated by extracting the features of usual facial expressions or behaviors of a user in an image captured by a web camera. Thus, we can expect that the robot may give a user learning supports in real time. In fact, we developed the base system that a robot provides hints in the timing estimated by extracting the human general feature tilting own head when we don't understand something. We attempted to evaluate the usefulness for the base system through the experiments of English words learning and some questionnaires for college students. In these experiments, we used a communication robot, PaPeRo, for confirming the counteraction and effect of users. This paper is discussed on the experimental results of the questionnaires and the possibility that user's motivation can be improved by the affinity of the robot in the system.