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An autonomous educational mobile robot mediator

Published: 01 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

So far, most of the applications of robotic technology to education have mainly focused on supporting the teaching of subjects that are closely related to the Robotics field, such as robot programming, robot construction, or mechatronics. Moreover, most of the applications have used the robot as an end or a passive tool of the learning activity, where the robot has been constructed or programmed. In this paper, we present a novel application of robotic technologies to education, where we use the real world situatedness of a robot to teach non-robotic related subjects, such as math and physics. Furthermore, we also provide the robot with a suitable degree of autonomy to actively guide and mediate in the development of the educational activity. We present our approach as an educational framework based on a collaborative and constructivist learning environment, where the robot is able to act as an interaction mediator capable of managing the interactions occurring among the working students. We illustrate the use of this framework by a 4-step methodology that is used to implement two educational activities. These activities were tested at local schools with encouraging results. Accordingly, the main contributions of this work are: i) A novel use of a mobile robot to illustrate and teach relevant concepts and properties of the real world; ii) A novel use of robots as mediators that autonomously guide an educational activity using a collaborative and constructivist learning approach; iii) The implementation and testing of these ideas in a real scenario, working with students at local schools.

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Autonomous Robots
Autonomous Robots  Volume 25, Issue 4
Nov 2008
102 pages

Publisher

Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2008

Author Tags

  1. Autonomous robot
  2. Mobile robots
  3. Robot-human interaction
  4. Robots in education

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  • (2023)Guiding the Development of Undergraduate Educational RoboticsProceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education Vol 110.1145/3576882.3617928(71-77)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
  • (2022)Research on the Design of Project-based Teaching & Learning Mode Assisted by Educational RobotProceedings of the 4th World Symposium on Software Engineering10.1145/3568364.3568387(148-154)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2022
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