Learning with social robots — The World Robot Summit's approach

It is anticipated that in the near future, social robots will become integral part of schools to enhance student learning experience. This paper reports students' experience through a new robotics competition with social robots for primary and secondary school students. The Junior category of the World Robot Summit (WRS) offers a new robotics competition for students focusing on the Co-Bot experience (human-robot co-existence), hosted by the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) and the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The social robot that is used in the World Robot Summit is Pepper, a sophisticated humanoid robot, offered by SoftBank Robotics. This paper focuses on students' experience as active users of social robots through the School Robot Challenge Workshop and Trial 2017 held in Tokyo, Japan in August 2017, where they programmed and/or developed solutions for the tasks using social robots. There were 13 teams from various countries participated in the two-and-half day workshop to learn to program Pepper, and two-day trial competition where they demonstrated their work. During the two-day trial, although there were some technical glitches, all 13 teams demonstrated their solutions and performance they developed with their Co-Bot ideas developed during the workshop.