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The Effect of a Robot’s Social Character on Children’s Task Engagement: Peer Versus Tutor

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9388))

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Abstract

An increasing number of applications for social robots focuses on learning and playing with children. One of the unanswered questions is what kind of social character a robot should have in order to positively engage children in a task. In this paper, we present a study on the effect of two different social characters of a robot (peer vs. tutor) on children’s task engagement. We derived peer and tutor robot behaviors from the literature and we evaluated the two robot characters in a WoZ study where 10 pairs of children aged 6 to 9 played Tangram puzzles with a Nao robot. Our results show that in the peer character condition, children paid attention to the robot and the task for a longer period of time and solved the puzzles quicker and better than in the tutor character condition.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Cristina Zaga, Manja Lohse, Khiet P. Truong & Vanessa Evers

Authors
  1. Cristina Zaga
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  2. Manja Lohse
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  3. Khiet P. Truong
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  4. Vanessa Evers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristina Zaga .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, ENSTA-ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    Adriana Tapus

  2. Inst für Informatik, Human-Ctr Multimedi, Universität Augsburg, Augsburg, Bayern, Germany

    Elisabeth André

  3. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Jean-Claude Martin

  4. Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, ENSTA-ParisTech, Palaiseau, France

    François Ferland

  5. LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

    Mehdi Ammi

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Zaga, C., Lohse, M., Truong, K.P., Evers, V. (2015). The Effect of a Robot’s Social Character on Children’s Task Engagement: Peer Versus Tutor. In: Tapus, A., André, E., Martin, JC., Ferland, F., Ammi, M. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_70

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_70

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25553-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25554-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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