Inquiry learning with a social robot: can you explain that to me?

This paper presents preliminary results of a study which assesses the impact a social robot might have on the verbalization of a child’s internal reasoning and knowledge while working on a learning task. In a comparative experiment we offered children the context of either a social robot or an interactive tablet for verbally explaining their thoughts, while keeping the content of the learning task identical. Results suggest the context of a social robot leads to a faster response time from the children.