Using a social robot for different types of feedback during university lectures

In this paper we present a long-term study in which a social robot was used as an embodied feedback channel during a series of university lectures spanning over one academic year. We used a Pepper robot from Softbank Robotics within an enactive didactics framework in order to reinforce the structural coupling between the teacher, the students and the content of the lecture. The robot provided different types of feedback during the lectures. In this paper we will focus on feedback that informed the students of their learning progress and that helped the teacher to understand how the students were able to follow each lecture. At the end of the lecture series we used questionnaires as qualitative measures for how the students perceived the feedback of the robot. Our results show a positive response of the students to the robot. We asked the students also how they thought the robot’s feedback affected their learning progress. The vast majority of the students reported that the robot indeed helped them to reflect about their level of understanding of the content of the lecture and facilitated the initiation of interventions to improve their learning.