A Robot Math Tutor that Gives Feedback

We report on the exploratory design and study of a robot math tutor that can provide feedback on specific errors made by children solving basic addition and subtraction problems up to 100. We discuss two interaction design patterns, one for speech recognition of answers when children think aloud, and one for providing error-specific feedback. We evaluate our design patterns and whether our feedback mechanism motivates children and improves their performance at primary schools with children (N=41) aged 7–9. We did not find any motivational or learning effects of our feedback mechanism but lessons learnt include that the robot can execute our interaction design patterns autonomously, and advanced algorithms for error classification and adaptation to children’s performance levels in our feedback mechanism are needed