Learning in Summer Camp with Social Robots: A Morphological Study

Social robots are gradually being integrated into the educational system. However, in extracurricular settings, such as summer day camps, educational robots are usually incorporated for the purpose of teaching STEM-related material. We study the effects of a novel, easy-to-use and scalable robotic platform on integration of social robots into summer camps. To this end, we compare the ability of two very different robot morphologies, namely, the novel, noncommercial, 3D-printed, puppet-like and low-cost Patricc and the commonly used humanoid, hard-exterior, high-cost and sophisticated Nao, to deliver word morphology-related activities to groups of up to 9 children over the span of a three-week session of a summer day camp. We present both quantitative results and qualitative insights into the integration process. Our results show that the children’s impressive learning outcomes were not affected by which robotic platform they interacted with. This suggests that educational summer-camp activities for young children with social robots can be effective, regardless of the morphology of the robot.