Teaching in a collaborative mathematic learning activity with and without a social robot

There is a growing interest in whether social robots, which are embodied and exhibit human-like behaviour, can be used for teaching and learning. Still, very few studies focus on the teacher’s role. This study focuses on how a teacher acted in a learning-by-teaching activity with 20 children. In this small-scale field experiment, the teacher’s interactions and teaching actions were observed when the teacher scaffolded a learning activity where children played a collaborative digital mathematics game to strengthen their mathematical reasoning and conceptual understanding of arithmetic. When playing, the children were acting as tutors for a tutee, according to the learning-by-teaching principle. In one scenario, the tutee was a younger child; in the other, the tutee was a social robot. Twenty 30-minute game-playing sessions are observed, video-recorded, and transcribed. The study explores the teacher’s interactions and teaching actions in the two scenarios and discusses the results from the perspective of the teacher’s role, social norms, and teacher digital competence. The interaction and thematic analyses show similarities and characteristic differences in the teacher’s interaction patterns in the two scenarios. The teaching actions are similar on a structural level and differ regarding the types and distribution of teaching actions. In the child-child scenario, the teacher directs most teaching actions to both players, and the actions are didactic (mathematical) scaffolding. In contrast, in the child-robot scenario, the teacher only addresses the tutor, and the scaffolding is socially oriented. Implications for a teaching practice involving social robots as learning companions are discussed regarding teachers’ presence and participation, types of social robot knowledge that go beyond digital competence, and new challenges introduced by using social robots as learning companions in the classroom. The study contributes new insights into the teacher’s role and actions when teaching with a social robot in a collaborative learning situation, which is relevant for educational research and teaching practice.