A Preliminary Study on Emotional Expression Methods for Collaborative Learning with a Partner Robot Using a Programming Education Board Game

Abstract

In recent years, the development of programming thinking skills has been emphasized in school education. In the research of educational support robots, which assist human learning, various robots have been developed to cultivate such skills in children. Our study focuses on a partner-type robot that promotes programming thinking through collaborative learning using board games designed for programming education. Conventional robots have employed the Urge system to generate expressions of emotion that resemble those of humans during question answering, thereby enhancing the sense of joint learning. Moreover, previous studies have suggested that emotional expressions during the process of judging correctness also contribute to a positive impression on the learner. Therefore, this study proposes a partner-type robot capable of expressing emotions both during response generation and during correctness evaluation. An experiment was conducted to compare the impressions formed by university students of four different robots, each exhibiting distinct processes of emotional expression.