This Robot Game Got Kids to Learn Proper Handwashing—But the Real Win Was How Much They Enjoyed It

Table of Links

• Abstract and I. Introduction
• II. The Casa Paradigm and Gamification
• III. Land of Hands: The Game
• IV. Methods
• V. User Study
• VI. Results
• VII. Discussion
  • VIII. Conclusion
  • IX. Acknowledgments and References

VII. DISCUSSION

We identify two major findings that answer our two research questions, which we present below:

Extent of Learning from the Proposed Platform: Our analyses indicate that children’s learning and retention from the proposed platform are significantly higher post-study when compared to pre-study data. This tells us that our platform was successful in educating children on hand hygiene. Interestingly we observed that children’s learning was not influenced by the pro-sociality of the robot. Also, both boys and girls learnt equally well.

Influence on Children’s Engagement and Interactions with the Robot: From our results, we conclude that the overall Interaction Level (IL) between the children and the robot was significantly higher in the pro-social scenario. Also, based on the IL index, it is interesting to note that girls interacted more with HakshE compared to boys. The frequency and duration of facial expressions and the frequency of verbal responses are significantly higher in the pro-social robot scenario than in the non-pro-social robot scenario. Though the duration of verbal responses in both the nudges conditions did not differ statistically significantly, from Figure 9(b), it is evident that the children verbally interacted with the robot more in the With-Nudges condition, even if they were not very verbose when they interacted with the robot. Thus we can say that a pro-social robot in a collaborative game-play setting increases positive social engagement with children. Also, the results tell us that gender differences in the above conditions do not influence children’s interaction with the robot in the pro-social vs nonpro-social case.

VIII. CONCLUSION

In this paper, we set out to explore whether an educational collaborative game-play platform with a pro-social robot (HakshE) can help children learn about good hand hygiene practises. We also explore the influence of the platform on children’s engagement and interactions with the robot. We start by proposing the design of our game - “Land of Hands” based on the theme of hand hygiene using Godot’s gaming engine and Alice 3. We then present the findings of a user study that we conducted with children aged 6-10 years to evaluate the effectiveness of our platform. We split our study into two conditions - “With-Nudges” and “Without-Nudges” to understand the influence of a pro-social robot’s nudges on children’s learning and interaction. We conclude that a collaborative gameplay scenario with a pro-social robot and children is successful in not only delivering the required learning outcomes but also in creating enjoyable interactions and engagement.

In the 2022-23 school year, we intend to conduct an inperson study using the proposed platform. We will explore the extent to which a pro-social robot affects other social engagement cues such as gestures and the gaze of the children. We also intend to evaluate the model in a long-term child-robot scenario to study the effect of the gameplay with the social robot on behaviour change itself.

IX. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Chancellor), a world-renowned humanitarian and spiritual leader without whose guidance and constant encouragement, this project would not have been possible. We would like to thank AMMACHI labs for providing seed funding for the project. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Bhavani Rao and Akshay Nagarajan for their continual support and valuable input during our study.

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