Use of Robots to Help Students With Diverse Needs

In most countries, the student population in schools continues to grow more diverse, and the unique learning needs of the students are recognized. In this respect, it is crucial to ensure that policies foster educational outcomes for all students, not just an average general education student. Since working on robots is very stimulating for especially young students, allowing them to develop key skills that will help them be successful during their school years and beyond in terms of problem-solving, creativity, scientific approach, and team spirit, robots are becoming more popular as an educational platform. For that reason, many types of robots are being involved in education. Robots with different features and capabilities, such as simple robots or socially interactive robots, are used in education, and usually, objectives and targets of a study and age group of students dictate the choices regarding robots. Considering the different roles of robots in education, in this chapter, the use of robots in the education of students with diverse needs is reviewed.

Use of Robots With Play-Based Interventions in the Education of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common developmental disorder involved in childhood neurodevelopmental disorders whose symptoms begin in early childhood. In recent years, interest in the use of technology in early diagnosis and training of ASD has been increasing day by day. For this purpose, socially interactive robots are used as tools to teach skills to children with ASD, play games with them, and reveal some desired behaviors. They also create interesting, engaging, and meaningful interaction situations that encourage children to interact with themselves. The aim of the child-robot interaction sessions is to enable children with ASD to overcome their shortcomings and understand the world better. In this context, robots can be considered as tools that will support the development of social skills of children with ASD and can be very useful for this purpose. To this end, this chapter includes studies on the use of play-based robot interventions in the education of children with ASD.

“Hmm, Did You Hear What I Just Said?”: Development of a Re-Engagement System for Socially Interactive Robots

Maintaining engagement is challenging in human–human interaction. When disengagements happen, people try to adapt their behavior with an expectation that engagement will be regained. In human–robot interaction, although socially interactive robots are engaging, people can easily drop engagement while interacting with robots. This paper proposes a multi-layer re-engagement system that applies different strategies through human-like verbal and non-verbal behaviors to regain user engagement, taking into account the user’s attention level and affective states. We conducted a usability test in a robot storytelling scenario to demonstrate technical operation of the system as well as to investigate how people react when interacting with a robot with re-engagement ability. Our usability test results reveal that the system has the potential to maintain a user’s engagement. Our selected users gave positive comments, through open-ended questions, to the robot with this ability. They also rated the robot with the re-engagement ability higher on several dimensions, i.e., animacy, likability, and perceived intelligence.

User Experience in Social Human-Robot Interaction

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people's lives, it is of major importance to stress the need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. However, a positive UX does not appear by itself but has to be designed for and evaluated systematically. In this paper, the focus is on the role and relevance of UX in human-robot interaction (HRI) and four trends concerning the role and relevance of UX related to socially interactive robots are identified, and three challenges related to its evaluation are also presented. It is argued that current research efforts and directions are not sufficient in HRI research, and that future research needs to further address interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.

Socially Interactive Robots Can Teach Young Students Language Skills; a Systematic Review

The goal of this systematic review is to consider whether social factors of robots allow the robots to be socially interactive language learning assistants for young students in the classroom. A total of 443 articles were found. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 17 empirical studies in which a robot assisted children in preschool through elementary school on their language skills were analyzed. This review discusses to which areas of language learning robots have been applied and how the social interaction of the robot influences student learning behaviors and outcomes. The results of this paper indicate that robots have capabilities that are useful for instructing students in oral language skills because of their socially interactive nature. There is room for this social dynamic to be researched further in the human factors and human robot interaction fields.

User Experience in Social Human-Robot Interaction

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people's lives, it is of major importance to stress the need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. However, a positive UX does not appear by itself but has to be designed for and evaluated systematically. In this paper, the focus is on the role and relevance of UX in human-robot interaction (HRI) and four trends concerning the role and relevance of UX related to socially interactive robots are identified, and three challenges related to its evaluation are also presented. It is argued that current research efforts and directions are not sufficient in HRI research, and that future research needs to further address interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.