2nd Workshop on Evaluating Child Robot Interaction

Many researchers have started to explore natural interaction scenarios for children. No matter if these children are normally developing or have special needs, evaluating Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) is a challenge. To find methods that work well and provide reliable data is difficult, for example because commonly used methods such as questionnaires donot work well particularly with younger children. Previous research has shown that children need support in expressing how they feel about technology. Given this, researchers often choose time-consuming behavioral measures from observations to evaluate CRI. However, these are not necessarily comparable between studies and robots. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from differentdisciplines to share their experiences on these aspects. The main topics are methods to evaluate child-robot interaction design, methods to evaluate socially assistive child-robot interaction and multi-modal evaluation of child-robot interaction. Connected questions that we would like to tackle are for example: i) What are reliable metrics in CRI' ii) How can we overcome the pitfalls of survey methods in CRI' iii) How can we integrate qualitative approaches in CRI' iv) What are the best practices for in the wild studies with children? Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we want to discuss advantages and short-comings of using different evaluation methods in order to compile guidelines for future CRI research. This workshop is the second in a series that started at the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2015

CAS: Centre for advanced studies

An introduction to the Centre for Advanced Studies.JRC.A.5-Scientific Developmen

The EASEL project: Towards educational human-robot symbiotic interaction

This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL technological developments, and end with a summary of what we have learned from the evaluation studies carried out in the project so far

Towards a synthetic tutor assistant: The EASEL project and its architecture

Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, discrimination of the learner’s utterances, expressions and mental states, which, in turn, require an integrated architecture combining perception, cognition and action. In this paper we present an attempt to improve the current state of robots in the educational domain by introducing the EASEL EU project. Specifically, we introduce the EASEL’s unified robot architecture, an innovative Synthetic Tutor Assistant (STA) whose goal is to interactively guide learners in a science-based learning paradigm, allowing us to achieve such rich multimodal interactions

Evaluation Methods for User-Centered Child-Robot Interaction

This review examines recent methodological approaches for the evaluation of child-robot interaction in learning settings. The main aims are to map existing work from a user-centered perspective, to identify possible trends related to evaluation methods for child-robot interaction, and to discuss potential future directions. We present a systematic review of existing studies, which have been thematically organized based on their research objectives. We then examine the evaluation methods that were used in these studies and we propose a conceptual framework based on the one hand on the themes that emerged, namely the social interaction between the child and the robot, the social acceptance, possible emotional interactions, the learning process and the learning outcome, and on the other hand on the corresponding measures. These methods have been considered in relation with the age ranges of the children, because of the relationship of their cognitive level to the choice of a developmentally appropriate evaluation method. We use this framework to highlight current trends and needs for the field and to contextualize the methodological directions for child-robot interaction. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations of the current methodological approaches as well as possible future directions for the evaluation methods of child-robot interaction in learning settings

Design challenges for long-term interaction with a robot in a science classroom

This paper aims to present the main challenges that emerged during the process of the research design of a longitudinal study on child-robot interaction for science education and to discuss relevant suggestions in the context. The theoretical rationale is based on aspects of the theory of social constructivism and we use the collaborative inquiry as a framework to examine children's learning process who interact with a robotic learning companion. We identify two main challenges; (i) the development of robust on-demand systems for long-term interaction; and (ii) the design of developmentally appropriate scaffolding in embodied, semi-structured learning tasks. To address these challenges, we suggest (i) the development of a system for the detection of child's intention for interaction in the context of a classroom and (ii) the design of sensorized learning materials for the support of developmentally appropriate embodied learning experience