Dialogue Robot to Broaden and Deepen Views of Children in Elementary School

With the age of diversification, it’s important to nurture the qualities of children to enable them to create their future society. To achieve this, it’s crucial for children to broaden and deepen their views through dialogue with others. In the field of human-agent interaction, introducing robots into educational settings has shown positive educational effects. In this study, we developed an autonomous dialogue robot that delved into the children’s ideas and prompted them to think about aspects they had not yet considered, to broaden and deepen their viewpoints. We introduced this developed robot into a 6th-grade science class and conducted an experiment. The results based on subjective evaluations by students through questionnaires and objective evaluations of the students’ reaction papers by third parties, suggest that discussions with the robot can broaden and deepen the viewpoints of students. This study highlights the potential of robots to support the important educational goal.