In this decade, there are more and more entertainment/assistant robots, for example Kanda et al. (2007) use a humanoid robot to help elementary school students to learn English in Japan and Siegwart et al. (2003) shows research using humanoid robots to help visitors in a Swiss Museum. Within a few years we could see tiny and powerful privately owned robots coming onto the market. There are many small-sized and powerful robots, including pet-like Sony Aibo ERS-110, humanoid Takaratomy Omnibot17μi-SOBOT and GeStream Be Robot.
There is much educational research into using puppets and/or toys to enhance learning for children, very few of these studies cover students older than elementary school ages. Also there is little research using personal robots such as small-sized and pet-like robots, to enhance learning and teaching in either the educational technology or the learning technology research fields. Teachers and researchers usually think of toys and robots as teaching tools rather than a teacher or learning companions.
The small-size and powerful personal robots are now affordable to people, for examples, Takaratomy Omnibot17μi-SOBOT is around 250 CAD and GeStream Be Robot is around 300 CAD. The robots can do a lot of actions and behaviors, even speak, by programming. Sony also sold wireless card for their AIBO Messenger robots and allowed the robots connecting with other computers.
There are eight important research issues are needed to be taken into considerations before we use robots for educational purpose: gender issues, course issues, appearances, humanoid or non-humanoid robots, real or virtual robots, importance degree of HRI factors, interaction issues, and cultural issues.
The prime aim of this research topic is to figure out the answers of the questions popped-up by the gender issue. The research questions include (1) do male students and female students have different attitudes toward to the robots? (2) do male students and female students like different types of robots? (3) do male students and female students have different interaction ways and frequency with the robots? (4) male students and female students consider the same robot has different genders?
For this research topic, we would like to see
1. revised and integrated questionnaire for getting people's learning backgrounds, non-private information (e.g. gender and country), perceptions of the gender issue relevant questions, personality prediction, possible learning styles etc.
2.conduct a focus group survey and refine the questionnaire
3.make sure the questionnaire has reliability and validity
4.build online questionnaire and collect as many feedback as we can
5.apply different methodologies to find the relations out, for examples factor analysis (component analysis and common factor analysis), ANOVA, Cronbach, etc
This research topic doesn't not require programming (or says may be a little bit of programming in developing the online questionnaire). The topic will need to do much more quantitative research and survey related academic papers.
The research topic could be taken as either essay, project or thesis topic. |
