It's LeviOsa, Not LevioSA: How Intentional Robot Mistakes Can Impact Children's Reading Skills

Learning-by-teaching, where a child learns through the act of teaching or helping a peer learn, has been shown to provide better learning outcomes than standard methods. While learning-by-teaching has been explored in some contexts in Human-Robot Interaction, we propose utilizing strategic robot errors to improve children's learning. We conducted an experimental study with thirty-one 6–8-year-old children in which a robot read a book to a child and the child was asked to point out and correct any mistakes the robot made. There were three conditions: no mistakes, simple mistakes, and targeted mistakes. While our data was insufficient to determine whether the type of errors the robot made affected children's learning, we did find the number of mistakes identified across conditions was different and discuss the effect they may have had on the sessions. We discuss implications of this research for pedagogical applications and future research ideas.