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Female Robots as Role-Models? - The Influence of Robot Gender and Learning Materials on Learning Success

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Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10948))

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Abstract

Social robots are likely to become a part of everybody’s future. One of their major areas of application lies in the domain of education. Especially for female learners, female teachers can act as role models in what learners might perceive as stereo-typical male learning domains. The present contribution investigates whether the gender of a social robot and learning materials that were either designed stereotypically male or stereotypically female, influence the learning success of female learners. A user study revealed that female students gained more knowledge when learning with a female robot using stereotypical male materials. We were thus taking a first step towards the possibility that social robots could serve as a tool to counteract social believes and minimize stereotypes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reeti Robot: http://www.reeti.fr/index.php/en/.

  2. 2.

    The robots behaviour was modelled using the Visual Scenemaker tool [15].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human-Computer Interaction, University of Wuerzburg, Wüerzburg, Germany

    Anne Pfeifer & Birgit Lugrin

Authors
  1. Anne Pfeifer
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  2. Birgit Lugrin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Birgit Lugrin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Carolyn Penstein Rosé

  2. University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Roberto Martínez-Maldonado

  3. University of Duisburg-Essen , Duisburg, Germany

    H. Ulrich Hoppe

  4. UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

    Rose Luckin

  5. UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

    Manolis Mavrikis

  6. UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

    Kaska Porayska-Pomsta

  7. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Bruce McLaren

  8. University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

    Benedict du Boulay

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Pfeifer, A., Lugrin, B. (2018). Female Robots as Role-Models? - The Influence of Robot Gender and Learning Materials on Learning Success. In: Penstein Rosé, C., et al. Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10948. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_51

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_51

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93845-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93846-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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