Ontologies-based pupil robot interaction with group discussion

Recently, robots have become increasingly familiar to humans as more and more service robots have been applied for use in various fields. The market for robots is expected to further expand in the next few decades, increasing the level of their involvement with humans. Based on this assumption, we have studied robots working cooperatively with humans at cafes, or classes that are conjointly conducted by a teacher and a robot. In contrast, in the current elementary school education system, there are increasing demands for not only transferring knowledge unilaterally from a teacher to pupils, but also inducing pupil's voluntary commitment to learning while maintaining their motivation. This has led to various experiments being conducted at educational sites. However, research that has been conducted so far on support for teachers has targeted robots that work only as a supporter of the teachers, making it insufficient to achieve these educational goals. In this study, based on the goals described above, we introduced robots to class discussion sessions with small groups and constructed a "discussion support robot" to facilitate discussion among children. Here, the robots played two roles as a discussion participant and as a discussion facilitator to not only assist teachers to proceed with a discussion among children. Moreover, a discussion session was conducted in an actual elementary school using this system as a case study and evaluations made by the pupils and teachers were reviewed.