Imagine a person engaged in a learning activity, be it solving math exercises with pen and paper or practicing a second language by playing a memory game with a social robot. In both cases, the activity has superficial, visible goals (to find the solution of the equation, to score more points than the other player) covering the deeper, more elusive goal of helping the person learn. In the specific case of learning activities involving social robot, this double-layered structure makes the design of the robot’s behaviour a fascinating challenge: while it is relatively straightforward to design a robot that’s a fierce competitor at a memory game, it is much less clear to envision how it should behave to support its human counterpart in learning. Similarly, the design of the experiment allowing for evaluating the robot’s behaviour, as well as the robot-enhanced learning activity as a whole, becomes at once crucial and non trivial.

In this 6th edition of the “Robots for Learning” workshop, international experts in the field will share their knowledge concerning the design of social robot behaviours which support learning, their embedding in a learning activity and the evaluation of their impact through an experiment and the assessment of the person’s learning. The workshop is organized as a highly interactive event, in which participants are encouraged to bring case studies taken from their own research and discuss them in groups and with the experts.

The workshop will be online (e.g Zoom) and highly interactive. Participants will be asked to prepare the workshop by 1/ answering some questions related to their work and 2/ doing some reading prior to the workshop. The workshop will have two types of session:

• Keynotes: invited senior researchers will share their perspectives and experiences on the field of technologies for education. They will be recorded to allow all participants watch them on-demand.
• Units: Each unit will aim to look at the participants' work with a certain angle, and will start with a short intro on the topic followed by a group work. Participants will be given tools to help them answer the questions relatively to their planned study/research.

Important Dates