I've also seen kids treat the robot as something kind of like a friend. As I've talked about before, kids treat the robot as something in between a pet, a tutor, and a technology. They show many social behaviors with robots—hugging, talking, tickling, giving presents, sharing stories, inviting to picnics—and they also show understanding that the robot can turn off and needs battery power to turn back on. In some of our studies, we've asked kids questions about the properties of the robot: Can it think? Can it break? Does it feel tickles? Kids' answers show that they understand that robot is a technological, human-made entity, but also that it shares properties with animate agents.
In many of our studies, we've deliberately tried to situate the robot as a peer. After all, one key way that children learn is through observing, cooperating with, and being in conflict with their peers. Putting the cute, fluffy robot in a peer-like role seemed natural. And over the past six years, I've seen kids mirror robots' behaviors and language use, learning from them the same way they learn from peers.
I began to wonder about the impact of the relational features of the robot on children's engagement and learning: that is, the stuff about the robot that influences children's relationships with the robot. These relational features include the social behaviors we have been investigating, as well as others: mirroring, entrainment, personalization, change over time in response to the interaction, references to a shared narrative, and more. Some teachers I've talked to have said that it's their relationship with their students that really matters in helping kids learn—what if the same was true with robots?
My hunch—one I'm exploring in my dissertation right now via a 12-week study at Boston-area schools—is that yes: kids' relationships with the robot do matter for learning.
But how do you measure that?
I dug into the literature. As it turns out, psychologists have observed and interviewed children, their parents, and their teachers about kids' peer relationships and friendship quality. There are also scales and questionnaires for assessing adults' relationships, personal space, empathy, and closeness to others.
I ran into two main problems. First, all of the work with kids involved assumptions about peer interactions that didn't hold with the robot. For example, several observation-based methodologies assumed that kids would be freely associating with other kids in a classroom. Frequency of contact and exclusivity were two variables they coded for (higher frequency and more exclusive contact meant the kids were more likely to be friends). Nope: Due to the setup of our experimental studies, kids only had the option of doing a fairly structured activity with the robot once a week, at specific times of the day.
The next problem was that all the work with adults assumed that the experimental subjects would be able to read. As you might imagine, five-year-olds aren't prime candidates for filling out written questionnaires full of "how do you feel about X, Y, or Z on a 1-5 scale." These kids are still working on language comprehension and self-reflection skills.
I found a lot of inspiration, though, including several gems that I thought could be adapted to work with my target age group of 4-6 year-olds. I ended up with an assortment of assessments that tap into a variety of methodologies: questions, interviews, activities, and observations.