Tony Belpaeme and his team won the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2019 for their paper “Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots:A Large-Scale Study“. You can download a free copy of the paper here.
The abstract of the paper is:
We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of arobot’s iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3)the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot’s iconic gestures on learning gains.
