Abstract
Telling stories and playing games are important for the development of children language, cognitive and social skills. Using robots as characters of digital stories and agents of embodied cognition will further advance children’s creativity, teamwork and other 21st century skills. Additional use of gamification techniques improves emotional engagement and helps young children more easily grasp abstract concepts.
In this study we describe a general framework for designing robotics-based board games for primary school students, aiming at the assimilation of abstract concepts. The purpose of such games is to provide additional environments promoting children’s personal development and improving their socialization skills. The case study in this paper specifically relates to human rights, both as a general concept and as a set of principles helping to prevent inappropriate behavior in different social situations. In this case, having a general framework simplifies the board game design procedure, allowing focusing on a particular set of human rights (or more generally, any other abstract concepts) in everyday life situations.
Field-testing observation indicates that students enjoy this way of learning. Use of robots as their embodied external agents helped students to learn behavior principles. We propose that further field studies should assess and measure long term learning benefits, compared to appropriate control groups.
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Notes
- 1.
An example of game storyline is on this link: http://bit.ly/2FuvzNw.
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Leoste, J. et al. (2021). Using Robots for Digital Storytelling. A Game Design Framework for Teaching Human Rights to Primary School Students. In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_3
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