Introducing High School Students in Natural Interaction Through the Robobo Educational Robot

The aim of this paper is to provide high school teachers with a structured activity to introduce their students in Natural Interaction fundamentals in the scope of Artificial Intelligence (AI) education. This is a key topic in AI literacy development, and the number of formal activities that can be used at classes is scarce. The one presented here has been designed and tested in the scope of the Erasmus + project called AI +, which aims to develop an Artificial Intelligence (AI) curriculum for high school students. AI + follows a Project Based Learning (PBL) teaching methodology, where the AI topics are trained following a practical approach, with a learning by doing perspective. In this case, the students faced the challenge of programming the Robobo educational robot to create a “robotic pet”, which should react to different interactions with the user in a natural way, showing appropriate emotions and using multimodal communication options. Students were introduced in basic aspects of human-robot interaction required to provide their own personality to the robot. The activity was tested in an educational intervention with seventeen high school students from 4 different countries. Due to COVID restrictions, the activity was carried out in online fashion in 2 sessions, using the RoboboSim simulator. Successful results were obtained in terms of understanding of the underlying concepts of Natural Interaction, and their relevance in AI.