Browsing by Author "Ohls, Olli"

Goals. Social Robotics is a subfield of Robotics, which focuses on robots that interact with humans. In this study I examine the effects of social robots on ch ildren's learning. Primarily I am interested in investigating what kinds of content has been t aught to children using social robots as mediators. The second goal of this study is to criticall y evaluate the current methodological practices of the field of Social Robotics in this s etting. There does not exist any prior systematic reviews regarding this research topic. Methods. A systematic review was chosen as the method of this study, bec ause it enables a systematic approach to studying the content taught by socia l robots as mediators. The research data was composed of seven international publication s related to social robotics and children’s learnings. I analyzed the publications separate ly as well as cross­examining them to find patterns of similarity and differences related to me thodological details. Three of the seven studies were uncontrolled studies and four were contr olled studies. The amount of participants in the studies ranged from 9 to 45 persons. I used narrative discussion as the method of synthesizing the results, which were then presente d under relevant themes. This descriptive and summative method was a suitable choice for this stu dy, because the studies were diverse in methodologies and background theories used. Results and discussion. The results of this study indicated that social robots have bee n used to teach programming and robotics, sciences and languages . Four of the seven studies were related to teaching English language using social rob ots. The studies were methdologically diverse in nature due to differences in the robot s’ physical and behavioral functionality, which brought forth the question of “how gener alizable the results of studies in this field are?”, as well as the lack of universal methodologically s ound practices for the field. A more thorough methodological evaluation revealed weak nesses in small participant sizes and a low amount of detail related to the intervention given in controlled studies.