Social Robots as Mediators in Enactive Didactics.
Initiating self-reflection in students.
Lehmann, H., Rossi, P.G.
We used a Pepper robot during university lectures over the course of one year. In order to explore the mediatory potential of the robot we developed an application we called “The Doubts of Pepper”, in which the robot interrupts the lecture at specific moments and asks the teacher questions about the content of the lecture. This application has different intended functions. It aims on one hand at recapturing and focusing the attention of the students, and, on the other, to initiate self-reflection in the students. The questions are chosen in such a way that they correspond, according to the hypothesis at the basis of the enactive didactics framework of our research, to questions that the students tend to have, even if they are not fully aware of them, or ready to formulate them. In this sense, in our approach, the role of the robot is meant to be crucial for the successful establishment of an activity of reflection in the students.
Hagen Lehmann
Pier Giuseppe Rossi
Hagen Lehmann is a researcher, specialized in social robotics for caring and teaching. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Bath, UK and a masters degree in Comparative Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, Germany.
Pier Giuseppe Rossi is professor for didactic and special pedagogy at the University of Macerata. His research interested are technology enhanced learning, enactivism and instructional design.