Related papers: Promoting scientific thinking with robots
Curiosity-driven learning has shown significant positive effects on students' learning experiences and outcomes. But despite this importance, reports show that children lack this skill, especially in formal educational settings. To address…
Though a goal of HRI is the natural integration of social robots into everyday public spaces, real-world studies still occur mostly within controlled environments with predetermined participants. True public spaces present an environment…
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…
This study evaluates the integration of AI-powered robots in early childhood education, focusing on their impact on emotional self-regulation, engagement, and collaborative skills. A ten-week experimental design involving two groups of…
As collaborative robots enter industrial shop floors, logistics, and manufacturing, rapid and flexible evaluation of human-machine interaction has become more important. The availability of consumer headsets for virtual and augmented…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
Humans have developed the capability to teach relevant aspects of new or adapted tasks to a social peer with very few task demonstrations by making use of scaffolding strategies that leverage prior knowledge and importantly prior joint…
When presented with an unknown robot (subject) how can an autonomous agent (learner) figure out what this new robot can do? The subject's appearance can provide cues to its physical as well as cognitive capabilities. Seeing a humanoid can…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
Robots today often miss a key ingredient of truly intelligent behavior: the ability to reflect on their own cognitive processes and decisions. In humans, this self-monitoring or metacognition is crucial for learning, decision making and…
Although innovation and the support of new technologies are much needed to ease the burden on the education system, social robots in schools to help teachers with educational tasks are rare. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) could support…
Teaching and learning physical skills often require one-on-one interaction, making it difficult to scale up, as there are not enough human teachers. Robots offer an attractive alternative. This paper presents TeachingBot, an adaptive…
As AI systems shape individual and societal decisions, fostering critical AI literacy is essential. Traditional approaches, such as blog articles, static lessons, and social media discussions, often fail to support deep conceptual…
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly reshaping how students and instructors engage with course material -- and how they think about academic integrity. This paper presents a classroom activity designed to help physics students…
We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational, but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Learning from demonstration allows for rapid deployment of robot manipulators to a great many tasks, by relying on a person showing the robot what to do rather than programming it. While this approach provides many opportunities, measuring,…
With the increasing presence of robotic systems and human-robot environments in today's society, understanding the reasoning behind actions taken by a robot is becoming more important. To increase this understanding, users are provided with…
As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through…
The gaze of a person tends to reflect their interest. This work explores what happens when this statement is taken literally and applied to robots. Here we present a robot system that employs a moving robot head with a screen-based eye…