This year for my psychology honours thesis (at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia), I’m undertaking a multidisciplinary research project, examining children’s interactions with social robots in an educational context. We will measure if there are any differences between the way preschoolers interact and engage with a social robot (NAO) instructor vs a human instructor.
In this fun video: NAO the humanoid social robot you can see me, Jason Zagami (IT) and Dr Michelle Neumann (Education) meet and interact with NAO who is programmed to interact with preschoolers. The study will measure communication and behavioural interactions to see if preschoolers will interact/engage differently with a human instructor vs a social robot instructor.
We start our data collection with the preschoolers next week. Us adults were ever so excited to meet NAO, so I can imagine how excited the children will be!