Promoting Student Utterances Using a Robot Assisted Questioning System: Field Experiment in a Lecture for High-School and University Students

Abstract

During classroom-type lectures, some students feel difficulty in asking questions, although it is considered to improve the lecture quality and students’ understanding. We propose a system called Robot-Assisted Questioning System (RAQS) that can promote teacher-student communication in the lecture. It allows students to post questions and opinions on an online messaging interface. The messages were sent to a robot to be posed to the teacher, with or without the voting procedure. In this paper, we report a case study of the field experiment in a lecture which was assisted by RAQS. Students found RAQS efficient and useful for improving their communication with the teacher. For the practical use, the results suggest a future improvement of the system to add the function for controlling the number of robot utterance to avoid interference with the teaching process.