Development of a learning support system with PaPeRo

We propose a learning support system with a robot for asynchronous learning. The proposed system consists of a teacher, a user, a robot, a personal computer, an educational material, and a web camera. In asynchronous learning, the timing to provide the supports such as hints and answers in learning is one of important factors. Here, we endowed a robot with this roll on the timing estimated by extracting the features of usual facial expressions or behaviors of a user in an image captured by a web camera. Thus, we can expect that the robot may give a user learning supports in real time. In fact, we developed the base system that a robot provides hints in the timing estimated by extracting the human general feature tilting own head when we don´t understand something. We attempted to evaluate the usefulness for the base system through the experiments of English words learning and some questionnaires for college students. In these experiments, we used a communication robot, PaPeRo, for confirming the counteraction and effect of users. This paper is discussed on the experimental results of the questionnaires and the possibility that user´s motivation can be improved by the affinity of the robot in the system.