Project

Social Robot as a Younger Curious Peer

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Groups

One of the most fundamental and important characteristics of children is their curiosity. Can an interaction with a robot elicit, guide, and promote curiosity? In this project we use the DragonBot platform and a tablet app in a language educational setting with children. We test the hypothesis that a personalized, curiosity-driven behavior of a robot behaving as a younger peer, can affect a child's own curiosity. We use an in-house developed app in which the child's interaction with figures is automatically transformed into a spoken and written story. The social robot reacts to the story in an emotional way and then asks the child questions about it. The child and robot then switch roles, so that the robot tells the story and the child asks questions. The research question is whether the robot's curiosity-driven behavior affects the child's curiosity.