Metacognitive Processes Involved in Human Robot Interaction in the School Learning Environment

Abstract

With the ongoing digital revolution and the ever-increasing development of new technology, schools must provide students with a grounding in certain technical skills, such as computational thinking, which are likely to be required for future roles, including working with and operating robots. For such robot human interaction to be successful, introduction of robots into school learning environments is crucial. However, we also need to better understand the learning processes involved in this human robot interaction. Acknowledging the importance of metacognitive processes as an essential aspect in achieving learning outcomes in educational contexts, this article investigates the experiences of students in human-robotic interactions and related tasks (programming and math) by exploring the student’s self-assessment of perceived performance (JOP), motivation (fun and difficulty) and learning. This aim has been achieved through a pilot study whereby the authors conducted a three-day workshop with grade 6 students and collected pre and post survey data. The findings contribute knowledge to our understanding of the importance of metacognition and in particular accurate self-assessment as crucial for both motivation and learning with humanoid robots.