Abstract We explored the potential of a robotics application in education as a measurement tool of child executive functioning skills. Sixty-five kindergarteners received assignments to go through a maze with a programmable robot, the Bee-Bot. Via observation we quantified how they solved these tasks. Their performance was successfully aggregated into a latent variable, which was used to predict the outcomes on standardized tasks that measure executive functioning. The latent variable significantly predicted performance on several tasks that measure problem-solving abilities, memory, visuospatial abilities and attention. It did not significantly predict pencil-and-paper tasks that measured visuospatial ability and nonverbal or design fluency. This study showed that it is possible to use a playful robotics task to obtain information on children’s ability. We recommend more research on using diverse robots in larger samples with different age groups to further explore the possibilities of robots as a test instrument.

中文翻译：

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在幼儿园使用顽皮的机器人对执行功能的测量

摘要我们探索了机器人技术在教育中作为儿童执行功能技能的一种测量工具的潜力。六十五名幼儿园的孩子接到任务，要用一个可编程的机器人Bee-Bot迷宫。通过观察，我们量化了他们如何解决这些任务。他们的绩效已成功汇总到一个潜在变量中，该变量用于预测衡量执行职能的标准化任务的结果。潜在变量显着预测了在多项任务中的表现，这些任务衡量解决问题的能力，记忆力，视觉空间能力和注意力。它没有显着预测可以测量视觉空间能力以及非语言或设计流畅度的纸笔任务。这项研究表明，可以使用有趣的机器人任务来获取有关儿童能力的信息。我们建议进行更多研究，以使用不同年龄段的较大样本中的各种机器人，以进一步探索将机器人用作测试仪器的可能性。