Analysis of the Application of the Bee-Bot Robot for the Development of Social Reciprocity Skills in Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Increasingly, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being used as a resource in the teaching–learning process of students with special educational needs. Specifically, the needs of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to align perfectly with ICT, especially with Pedagogical Robotics, as it enables the creation of predictable and controllable environments. For this reason, the main aim of this research has been to apply the Bee-Bot robot to improve the social-emotional reciprocity responses of students with ASD. Therefore, a quantitative research based on a quasi-experimental methodology and a pre-test-post-test design has been developed. The sample of participants was composed by 22 children with ASD. In this sense, the experimental group was composed by 11 students who developed the activities through the mediation of the Bee-Bot robot. While the control group was composed by 11 other students who developed non-robotics mediated activities. An ad hoc instrument consisting of 44 items divided into three dimensions, related to the communication and social interaction area, was used. Each participant participated in ten individual sessions lasting fifteen minutes. The results indicate improvements in the post-test because of the use of robotics as a mediating learning tool. For example, there are improvements in items 1 and 2 related to attention with p values less than 0.05, as well as improvements in items 13, 15 and 16 related to the identification and discrimination of emotions. Furthermore, the results of the intra-group analysis show, on the one hand, significant differences on the part of the control group in item 13, related to emotion identification and discrimination skills. On the other hand, in the case of the experimental group, the number of items in which there are significant differences is greater. Specifically, participants in the experimental group show significant differences in items related to attention, basic social skills, conversational skills and emotion identification skills. In conclusion, the Bee-Bot robot, accompanied by a pedagogical programme, has potential for learning social-emotional reciprocity skills in these students.