Co-Learning around Social Robots with School Pupils and University Students – Focus on Data Privacy Considerations

Abstract

We adopt a novel approach of co-learning between elementary school pupils and university students around social robots and robotics. Social robots provide a motivational learning tool for various learning tasks. Having different learner groups together may bring in new insights, perspectives and learning. Although social robots provide an interesting platform for learning, they have challenges in terms of data privacy, as they track, process and transfer personal data. These matters should be carefully considered. We describe a qualitative and exploratory study including two phases: 1) design of co-learning activities (N=16), and 2) evaluation of co-learning activities (N=56). All co-learning tasks were developed by utilizing privacy-sensitive robotics approach and the tasks included some learning content about data privacy. The evaluation was conducted as co-learning workshops with school pupils of 10 to 15 years and international university students. We report findings about the co-learning experience of these learner groups, as well as their data privacy learnings on social robots. We also present considerations for educational robotics from the data privacy perspective.