A Robot TA System Promoting Students' Active Participation in Lectures

Q&A session is an important part in face-to-face lectures that teacher explains and students listen. There are, however, some factors for hindering students’ self-active questions such as a student may concern about other students and atmosphere in a classroom. As a result, the lecture may progress without obtaining sufficient students’ understanding. In this paper, we propose a system allowing the students for asking questions to the teacher via a humanoid robot. The proposed system is developed as a web application, so the students can readily use the system by using their own smartphones or PCs with a standard web browser and a network connection. The students can actively ask questions to the teacher and other students by typing and sending their questions, and at the same time the humanoid robot raises its hand and speaks. The system enables both teacher and students to share the questions in the classroom. We implement the system by combining a web application and a humanoid robot. We elaborate the background and objective of the research, system implementation method, and experimental results in this paper.