Designing a Social Robot to Support Children’s Inquiry Learning: A Contextual Analysis of Children Working Together at School

Designers of educational interventions are always looking for methods to improve the learning experience of children. More and more, designers look towards robots and other social agents as viable educational tools. To gain inspiration for the design of meaningful behaviours for such educational social robots we conducted a contextual analysis. We observed a total of 22 primary school children working in pairs on a collaborative inquiry learning assignment in a real world situation at school. During content analysis we identified a rich repertoire of social interactions and behaviours, which we aligned along three types of interaction: (1) Educational, (2) Collaborational, and (3) Relational. From the results of our contextual analysis we derived four generic high-level recommendations and fourteen concrete design guidelines for when and how a social robot may have a meaningful contribution to the learning process. Finally, we present four variants of our Computer Aided Learning system in which we translated our design guidelines into concrete robot behaviours.