User Experience Design and Evaluation of Persuasive Social Robot As Language Tutor At University : Design And Learning Experiences From Design Research
Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is a developing field where research and innovation are progressing. One domain where Human Robot Interaction has focused is in the educational sector. Various research has been conducted in education field to design social robots with appropriate design guidelines derived from user preferences, context, and technology to help students and teachers to foster their learning and teaching experience. Language learning has become popular in education due to students receiving opportunities to study and learn any interested subjects in any language in their preferred universities around the world. Thus, being the reason behind the research of using social robots in language learning and teaching in education field. To this context this thesis explored the design of language tutoring robot for students learning Finnish language at university. In language learning, motivation, the learning experience, context, and user preferences are important to be considered. This thesis focuses on the Finnish language learning students through language tutoring social robot at Tampere University. The design research methodology is used to design the persuasive language tutoring social robot teaching Finnish language to the international students at Tampere University. The design guidelines and the future language tutoring robot design with their benefits are formed using Design Research methodology.
Elias Robot, a language tutoring application designed by Curious Technologies, Finnish EdTech company was used in the explorative user study. The user study involved Pepper, Social robot along with the Elias robot application using Mobile device technology. The user study was conducted in university, the students include three male participants and four female participants. The aim of the study was to gather the design requirements based on learning experiences from social robot tutor. Based on this study findings and the design research findings, the future language tutoring social robot was co-created through co design workshop. Based on the findings from Field study, user study, technology acceptance model findings, design research findings, student interviews, the persuasive social robot language tutor was designed. The findings revealed all the multi modalities are required for the efficient tutoring of persuasive social robots and the social robots persuade motivation with students to learn the language. The design implications were discussed, and the design of social robot tutor are created through design scenarios
