This paper reports the effects of praise from two robots on children’s learning time, their performance, and their acceptance of the robots. Since praise from a single robot provides positive effects for children as educational support, we hypothesized that praise from two robots will increase such effects because two robots will enhance the social influences. To verify this hypothesis, we developed an English learning system that consisted of an e-learning application, a depth sensor for human-tracking, a tabletop humanoid robot, a doll-type robot, and an operator. We designed the robots to interactively praise children during their learning situations and experimented with a with-in participant design to compare the effects of praise from two robots and just one. 22 children participated in an experiment whose results showed that children learned more when two robots praised them than just one, even with an identical amount of praise. These results suggest the effectiveness and empirical evidence of using two robots for educational support.

本文报告了两个机器人的表扬对儿童学习时间、表现和对机器人的接受度的影响。由于单个机器人的表扬作为教育支持为儿童提供了积极的影响，我们假设两个机器人的表扬会增加这种效果，因为两个机器人会增强社会影响。为了验证这一假设，我们开发了一个英语学习系统，该系统由一个电子学习应用程序、一个用于人体跟踪的深度传感器、一个桌面人形机器人、一个娃娃型机器人和一个操作员组成。我们设计的机器人可以在孩子的学习情况下互动地表扬他们，并尝试了一种内置参与者设计来比较两个机器人和一个机器人的表扬效果。22 名儿童参与了一项实验，该实验的结果表明，当两个机器人表扬他们时，孩子们学到的比一个机器人要多，即使表扬量相同。这些结果表明使用两个机器人进行教育支持的有效性和经验证据。