Investigating the effect of a robotic presence compared to a virtual robot in teaching angles and turn measurements to children

Abstract

In the later years robotics has seen a huge increase within domestic use, and have now become an affordable tool in the daily life of most people. The goal of this project was to investigate the differences between a physical and virtual robot in terms of increased content knowledge, learning motivation, and interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). To investigate this we conducted an experiment at Trondheim m International School (THIS), using a quasi-experimental setup with two treatment group, virtual and physical robot. The results showed that there does not exist a statistically significant difference in content knowledge gain, motivation or interest between the robotics group and the simulator group.