Kory Westlund, J., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. (2015). A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people. In Proceedings of New Friends: The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education.
This work investigates young children's perceptions of social robots in a learning context. Because social robots are a relatively new technology, direct comparison to more familiar means of learning could give us useful insights. Here, we compared the efficacy of three sources of information (human, robot, and tablet/iPad) with respect to children's rapid learning of new words. Our results suggested that in this simple case, all three interlocutors served equally well as providers of new words. However, children strongly preferred learning with the robot, and considered it to be more like a person than like an iPad. Follow-up work will examine more complex learning tasks.