Can Using Pointing Gestures Encourage Children to Ask Questions?

Even though asking questions is fundamental for self-motivated learning, children often have difficulty verbalizing them. Hence, we hypothesized that a robot’s capability to perceive pointing gestures will encourage children to ask more questions. We experimentally tested this hypothesis with the Wizard-of-Oz technique with 92 elementary-school students who interacted with our robot in a situation where it served as a guide who explains a museum exhibit. The children asked the robot significantly more questions when it could perceive pointing gestures than when it lacked such a capability. We also discuss the possibility of implementing autonomous robots based on the findings of our Wizard-of-Oz approach.

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