Does a robot tutee increase children’s engagement in a learning-by-teaching situation?

This paper presents initial attempts to combine a humanoid robot with the teachable agent approach. Several design choices are discussed, including the decision to use a robot instead of a virtual agent and which behaviours to implement in the robot. A pilot study explored how the interaction with a robot seemed to influence children’s engagement as well as their attribution of mental states to a robot and to a virtual agent. Eight children participated and the interaction was measured via an observational protocol and a conversational interview. A main outcome was large individual differences between the children’s interaction with the robot compared to the virtual agent.