Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: PATHWiSE - Supporting Teacher Authoring of Robot-Assisted Homework

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Researchers in the learning sciences describe learning as a social activity where social interactions with others are conducive to developing deep and lasting knowledge. Teachers often help students using social interactions in science classrooms by providing guidance to students, including giving small cues to what students might notice about their learning, restating key points in what others are explaining, or asking students questions to explain their reasoning. However, during homework, students usually complete lessons by themselves without the aid of rich social interaction that comes from teacher guidance. To help students during homework, educational technologies can provide personalized support for lessons, but most systems lack the ability to provide the type of socially rich guidance that teachers use in classrooms. One solution is to use social robots, or learning companion robots, as an educational technology capable of providing a social learning experience and personalized supports for students as they complete their homework. A major challenge in providing homework lessons designed for social robotic support is a lack of tools for teachers to create and customize these lessons. To address that challenge, in this project, researchers will partner with middle school science teachers and students, to design PATHWiSE, Personalized Augmentation Tools for HomeWork in Science Education, a homework studio for robot augmented learning. The PATHWiSE homework studio is an online system where teachers can design lessons and add robot interactions to science homework and students can log on with a robot in their home to engage in these robot-assisted homework activities. PATHWiSE empowers teachers to add guidance for students during homework by including guiding comments, highlighting material, and asking questions that relate to their classrooms and students lived experiences. With help from the PATHWiSE tool, teachers can transform homework into a socially interactive experience that can vastly improve the learning experience for students of all abilities. This work makes significant societal contributions through an innovative technology that can transform at-home learning experiences; new knowledge and guidance that demonstrate how to develop teacher authoring tools for complex technologies, and new recommendations that inform real-world practice of integrating social robots into science curriculum. Students usually complete homework lessons in isolation rather than through rich social interaction. Educational technologies can support student homework via step-by-step feedback or proficiency tracking, but most systems lack mechanisms to provide guidance that reflects the socio-cultural experiences students have in and out of the classroom. To address that challenge, researchers in this project will conduct design-based research in partnership with middle school science teachers and students to co-design PATHWiSE, Personalized Augmentation Tools for HomeWork in Science Education, a homework studio for robot augmented learning. The PATHWiSE homework studio is an open-source online system that includes a teacher authoring environment for adding teacher guidance to science homework activities and a student homework environment where students engage in robot-assisted homework activities. PATHWiSE uses a modified trigger-action programming environment that visually overlays trigger-action pairs directly onto multimedia homework activities in the teacher interface. Teachers indicate trigger points, indicating where to provide guidance, and associated actions that describe the robot response at that trigger point. As students work at home with the PATHWiSE interface, the robot will retrieve trigger-action pairs for an assignment from a database. When a trigger point is reached, the associated actions will be translated into robot behaviors (verbal, non-verbal, and movement actions). Finally, researchers will conduct a pilot study to examine teacher use and student experiences with the PATHWiSE system, where teachers will create augmented homework assignments, embedded over four weeks in their actual curriculum, and students will complete these assignments at home with either the robot or a similar computer-based system. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.