Luciana Benotti

About

Luciana Benotti is a leading researcher in computer science education and human-robot interaction, with a focus on making programming accessible to learners of all ages. Her most impactful work centers on developing innovative tools that blend natural language, robotics, and automatic assessment to teach computational thinking. Her 2017 paper on the Chatbot platform (138 citations) introduced a novel approach where high school students learn CS concepts by programming conversational agents, supported by automatic formative assessment. She further extended this to younger learners in a 2015 study (90 citations) that demonstrated how preschool and elementary school children can grasp fundamental CS concepts using a multilanguage robot programming platform supporting drag-and-drop, Python, and C++. Benotti's contributions also include pioneering work on interpreting natural language instructions for robots, exploring polite interactions in task-oriented dialogues, and creating the UNC++Duino kit for progressive robot programming. Her research has been recognized for its practical impact on CS education in Argentina and beyond, bridging the gap between language, vision, and behavior in autonomous systems.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   A Tool for Introducing Computer Science with Automatic Formative Assessment

   138 citations · 2017
2. 2
   A Comparison of Preschool and Elementary School Children Learning Computer Science Concepts through a Multilanguage Robot Programming Platform

   90 citations · 2015
3. 3
   Interpreting Natural Language Instructions Using Language, Vision, and Behavior

   9 citations · 2014
4. 4
   Polite Interactions with Robots

   6 citations · 2016
5. 5
   UNC++Duino: A Kit for Learning to Program Robots in Python and C++ Starting from Blocks

   4 citations · 2016
6. 6
   Visually Grounded Follow-up Questions: a Dataset of Spatial Questions Which Require Dialogue History

   2 citations · 2021

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links