Embodied Teachable Agents: Learning by Teaching Robots

Robots have an untapped potential to contribute to education by acting as subordinate learners for students to teach. The benefits that the act of teaching provides for one’s own learning have long been recognized; tutoring-associated improvements in measures like achievement scores, depth of understanding, and motivation are often far greater for the tutor than the tutee. Artificial agents can help students reap these benefits by providing surrogate pupils for them to teach, with potential advantages over human tutees. Robots have been observed to be more effective and compelling than virtual agents in a variety of contexts. However, research on teachable agents for education has been limited to virtual agents, while research on humans teaching robots has been concerned with learning for the benefit of the robot rather than that of the human. A new research direction exploring robots as teachable agents will lead to widespread benefits in education, and open new possibilities enabled by physical embodiment.