New Teacher Roles With Social Robots As Actors In The Classroom

Robots are entering the classrooms and provide new opportunities for education. Educational robots can either be used for programming, or as new types of social actors where these robots are designed to play different roles such as teachers, tutors, peers or tutees. However, new social actors affect the scene for learning by altering the social dynamics in the classroom, which in turn affects the roles of the other actors. In this study we explore the role of teachers in robot-enhanced classrooms, and ask the question: What new teacher roles emerge when robots enter the classroom as social actors? In this study we explore a setting where a student plays an educational mathematics game together with a humanoid robot on an interactive whiteboard, guided and supported by teachers and peers from the class. Four classes of school children in 2nd and 41h grade participated and played for about 5 minutes each. The game playing sessions were video-recorded, and 32 sessions were randomly selected, transcribed, coded and thematically analyzed using Interaction Analysis. Situations in which the teacher acted were analyzed to investigate when and why the teacher intervened and what types of support that was provided to the student. Results show that the teacher took several roles during the sessions. Traditional roles include moderator organizing the learning and managing social interactions as well as educator supporting the student's learning by scaffolding mathematical problems and game-playing strategies. In addition, the teacher had to act technical facilitator handling problems and challenges with using the robot, and the role as interaction mentor guiding and supporting the student to manage the social interaction with the robot. The latter two roles are challenging and unfamiliar to most teachers. We conclude that using robots as social actors in education introduce new, challenging teacher roles requiring substantial and specific digital competence.