2024 Volume 36 Issue 4 Pages 677-686
In resent years, educational-support-robots have attracted much attention. In conventional educational-support-robots, the number of problems to be solved by the learner (hereafter refered to as “the number of solved problems”) is fixed. This means that the collaborative learning with conventional robots does not allow the learner to create a self-directed learning environment. However, it is important to encourage the learner’s self-directed learning in order to facilitate long-term collaborative learning with the robot. In this study, we construct a method for proposing the number of solved problems based on politeness theory for a conversational robot，in which the learner decides the number of solved problems while conversing with the robot. In this paper, we verify the impression effect of our method (the Problem-Number Proposal Method) by comparing it with conventional robot with a predefined number of problems and a robot in which the learner can freely decide the number of problems. Experimental results shows that the robot using the Problem-Number Proposal Method with the PPS (positive politeness) and NPS (negative politeness) of the politeness theory improved the learner’s impression of the robot compared to conventional robot which does not talk with the learner. In addition, the number of solved problems that used our method was higher than that of the robot that allowed the learner to freely decide the number of solved problems through conversation with the learner.
