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Programming Embodied Interactions with a Remotely Controlled Educational Robot

Alexandros Merkouris,Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Published 2019 in ACM Transactions on Computing Education

ABSTRACT

Contemporary research has explored educational robotics, but it has not examined the development of computational thinking in the context of programming embodied interactions. Apart from the goal of the robot and how the robot will interact with its environment, another important aspect that should be taken into consideration is whether and how the user will physically interact with the robot. We recruited 36 middle school students to participate in a six-session robotics curriculum in an attempt to expand their learning in computational thinking. Participants were asked to develop interfaces for the remote control of a robot using diverse interaction styles from low-level to high-level embodiment, such as touch, speech, and hand and full-body gestures. We measured students’ perception of computing, examined their computational practices, and assessed the development of their computational thinking skills by analyzing the sophistication of the projects they created during a problem-solving task. We found that students who programmed combinations of low embodiment interfaces or interfaces with no embodiment produced more sophisticated projects and adopted more sophisticated computational practices compared to those who programmed full-body interfaces. These findings suggest that there might be a tradeoff between the appeal and the cognitive benefit of rich embodied interaction with a remotely controlled robot. In further work, educational robotics research and competitions might be complemented with a hybrid approach that blends the traditional autonomous robot movement with student enactment.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2019

  • Venue

    ACM Transactions on Computing Education

  • Publication date

    2019-07-16

  • Fields of study

    Computer Science, Engineering, Education

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1145/3336126
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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