Teaching-Assistant Robot Tutoring Students in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper describes a teaching-assistant robot that helps teachers conduct programming classes. Programming classes generally include explanations of the basic syntax of programming languages, their applications, and cording exercises. However, the time in these classes teachers spend debugging students’ programs is usually much longer than the actual class time. Such delays can affect the progress of programming classes and student motivation. Against this background, we have been developing a teaching-assistant robot that provides advice and assistance to students with questions to support the efficient flow of programming classes. In this paper, we describe a method in which a teaching-assistant robot locates a student who has a question, moves to the student, responds to the student's question about the assembly of a wheeled robot, and gives advice to the student in a simulated class about assembling a wheeled robot used for learning programming. The teaching-assistant robot is able to answer questions about the assembly of the wheeled robot and give advice. In addition, the effectiveness of the teaching-assistant robot is demonstrated through evaluation experiments.