Affective Socially Assistive Robots in Primary Education: Exploration to the Design Space of Social and Emotional Learning Robots
Eloranta, Elina (2021)
2021
Master's Programme in Human-Technology Interaction
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2021-05-19
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202105044413
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202105044413
Tiivistelmä
Despite the trend towards deploying artificial social agents into our everyday lives, little research on robotics and autonomous systems concentrates on developing the emotional intelligence skills of users through technology. The current research that regards emotional intelligence (EI) in connection with artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics today mainly concentrates on developing the technology at hand, but the potential of us humans benefiting largely from emotional learning through human-robot interaction is still very largely disregarded. Furthermore, in educational settings, teacher's own view of the correlation between socio-emotional skills and student success can predict the successful realization of emotional education (Buchanan, Gueldner, Tran & Merrell, 2009). Thus, the use of social robots may help enable equal opportunities for learning social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies while also improving the cost-effectiveness of SEL programming.
The overall aim of this research is to undertake an explorative examination of the perceived value of affective socially assistive robotics (SARs) in fostering SEL competencies among primary school children, and to build a unique SEL robot design framework for cultivation of emotional intelligence in primary schools. SEL robots being a novel topic, to my knowledge, there are no other existing frameworks that present the process and toolkit of designing SEL robots from a human-centered and experience-driven design viewpoint. The thesis begins with an extensive theoretical literature review for establishing the existing theories and their relationships. My qualitative research approach includes interviews as a data collection method, and affinity diagram and Grounded Theory (Corbin and Strauss, 2014) as data analysis methods. The target user group includes both children as primary users as well as class teachers and subject teachers as secondary users. Altogether, five language teachers and one class teacher participated in the research. The findings are reported on perceptions of a SEL robot’s contextual, experiential, physical, behavioural, and interactive factors, and a unique SEL robot design framework with two animated multimodal scenarios, that are the major contributions of this thesis. Based on the findings, I will discuss the UX goals and design implications of SEL robots, including, e.g., the perceived value and opportunities of the different goals and design variables for the design of such robots.
The overall aim of this research is to undertake an explorative examination of the perceived value of affective socially assistive robotics (SARs) in fostering SEL competencies among primary school children, and to build a unique SEL robot design framework for cultivation of emotional intelligence in primary schools. SEL robots being a novel topic, to my knowledge, there are no other existing frameworks that present the process and toolkit of designing SEL robots from a human-centered and experience-driven design viewpoint. The thesis begins with an extensive theoretical literature review for establishing the existing theories and their relationships. My qualitative research approach includes interviews as a data collection method, and affinity diagram and Grounded Theory (Corbin and Strauss, 2014) as data analysis methods. The target user group includes both children as primary users as well as class teachers and subject teachers as secondary users. Altogether, five language teachers and one class teacher participated in the research. The findings are reported on perceptions of a SEL robot’s contextual, experiential, physical, behavioural, and interactive factors, and a unique SEL robot design framework with two animated multimodal scenarios, that are the major contributions of this thesis. Based on the findings, I will discuss the UX goals and design implications of SEL robots, including, e.g., the perceived value and opportunities of the different goals and design variables for the design of such robots.