Abstract:

For a long time now, people have dreamed of creating an artificial counterpart by basically recreating themselves. Humanoid robots, which are appearing in more and more areas of daily life (such as receptionists in hotels and travel industry, as consultants in stores, as mobile information points at fairs, etc.) are a manifestation of this ancient human dream. Today, life-sized humanoid robots can already be purchased for the price of a small car, e.g. the robot 'Pepper' (1.2 m) from Softbank Robotics. There is no question that humanoid robots are becoming more and more important in everyday human life and will simply "belong" to our everyday experience sooner rather than later. What are the consequences for the individual and for society?

The BMBF (German federal ministry of education and research) funded project H.E.A.R.T. (Humanoid Emotional Assistant Robots in Teaching) explored the deployment of humanoid robots in higher education with qualitative methods in order to generate research questions and hypotheses to be investigated empirically on a larger population in future research.

The project focused on developing robot applications for the classroom, testing their added value and gathering more insides on best practices. The in-class tests have shown that humanoid robots are only valid partners in teaching under certain conditions which enable them to produce the desired added values that go beyond mere presence or display.

One of these conditions is a digital teaching format with highly collaborative in-class meetings, a second condition relates to the presence of digital data to create learner profiles for tailor-made counseling. In these deployment scenarios, the robot can develop its full potential by contributing to the teaching and consulting process through short contributions and questions and not through protracted explanations. Its responses are supported by its ability to display humanlike emotional behavior (representation of joy, frustration, sadness, etc.) making it not only more humanlike but also more relatable.

References:
[1] A. Edwards, C. Edwards, P.R. Spence, C. Harris, A. Gambino, “Robots in the classroom: Differences in students’ perceptions of credibility and learning between ‘teacher as robot’ and ‘robot as teacher’” in Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 65, pp. 627-634, 2016. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.06.005.
[2] C. Fernández-Llamas, M. A. Conde, F. J. Rodríguez-Lera, F. J. Rodríguez-Sedano, F. García, “May I teach you? Students' behavior when lectured by robotic vs. human teacher” in Computers In Human Behavior, vol. 80, pp. 460-469, 2018. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.09.028.
[3] J. Handke, “ Roboter im Hörsaal“ in IM+IO. Next Practices aus Digitalisierung, Management, Wissenschaft, vol. 3, pp. 74-78, 2018.
Project H.E.A.R.T., www.project-heart.de

Keywords:

Educational robotics, digitization, innovations in higher education, humanoid robots.