Towards dialogue dimensions for a robotic tutor in collaborative learning scenarios

Abstract

There has been some studies in applying robots to education and recent research on socially intelligent robots show robots as partners that collaborate with people. On the other hand, serious games and interaction technologies have also proved to be important pedagogical tools, enhancing collaboration and interest in the learning process. This paper relates to the collaborative scenario in EMOTE EU FP7 project and its main goal is to develop and present the dialogue dimensions for a robotic tutor in a collaborative learning scenario grounded in human studies. Overall, seven dialogue dimensions between the teacher and students interaction were identified from data collected over 10 sessions of a collaborative serious game. Preliminary results regarding the teachers perspective of the students interaction suggest that student collaboration led to learning during the game. Besides, students seem to have learned a number of concepts as they played the game. We also present the protocol that was followed for the purposes of future data collection in human-human and human-robot interaction in similar scenarios.