Effects of an Adaptive Robot Encouraging Teamwork on Students’ Learning

In this work, we designed a teachable robot that encourages a pair of students to discuss their thoughts and teaching decisions during the tutoring session. The robot adapts to the students’ talking activity and adjusts the frequency and type of encouragement. We hypothesize that the robot’s encouragement of group discussion can enhance the social engagement of group members, leading to improved learning and enjoyment. We ran a user study (n = 68), where a pair of participants (dyad) worked together to teach a humanoid robot about rocks and minerals. In the adaptive condition, the robot uses reinforcement learning to maximise interaction between the dyad members. Results show that the adaptive robot was successful in creating more dialogue between dyad members and in increasing task engagement, but did not affect learning or enjoyment. Over time, the adaptive robot was also able to encourage both members to contribute more equally to the conversation.