| dc.description.abstract | When learning in a drama for situational learning, students need to solve the simulated problems are encountered in the real world. However, during drama performing, no one would notice the mistakes made by the actors. Consequently, they might not learn the correct knowledge or learning materials in drama scripts. Also, since students generally are not professional performers, the engagement of student actors on drama performing and audience’s interest on watching may be decreased if the drama activities are not engaging in situational interaction. On the other hand, due to the curiosity, engagement, and instant feedback that a robot can brings, it can become an interesting actor companion to make drama performance more attractive. Besides, physical interaction offered by the robot can make students learn through embodied interactions according to the situation and time, thus making them have fun in performing. Therefore, this study aims to design and implement a tangible robot as an actor performing situational learning with students in the scenario provided by a designed digital theater. The robot acts as a mentor or a gate-keeping guard in learning script, so that students need to focus on learning materials embedded in the drama. Additionally, this study proposes a learning approach to explore learning motivation and performance of students learn with different interaction modes of robot actor within a digital situational learning environment.
In this study, 64 ninth graders in an English as second language course of junior high school Taiwan were employed to learn with a robot actor in a digital situational learning environment. The experimental group consists of 33 students used the digital theater with tangible robot touch interaction, gesture interaction, and dialog conversation. While the control group used the digital theater with robot non-touch interaction, non-gesture interaction, only context-related oral interaction. The experiment results showed a robot with more tangible actions had significant impact on the enhancement of learning performance than one without tangible interaction. Questionnaire results revealed that students’ learning motivation and authenticity were improved when a robot actor with tangible interactive modes was employed inside the digital theater. Also, based on the observations, we conclude that dynamic scenario, robot’s unexpected and randomness feedbacks, evaluation from system, and audience participation may play a vital role to maintain students’ engagement and motivation for long-term use of robot actor with tangible interaction inside digital situational learning environment. | en_US |