How hot is the Bookbot? Designing for emotion and motivation in reading with a social robot in school

Motivation to read literature has declined for many years among school children.

This project takes on that problem by exploring how a social robot could assist teachers in supporting 10–11-year-olds´ emotional and motivational experiences of reading.

The primary purpose of this co-design research project is to qualitatively explore universal design of reading activities that include a social robot, and to understand motivational and emotional dimensions of how teachers and students experience reading with a robot. The secondary purpose is to quantitatively evaluate the effect on motivation of reading with a robot.

Earlier research indicate that social robots can potentially act as joint-reading partners by engaging children in scaffolded story-related conversations in inclusive ways for a diversity of readers.

How to achieve such goals remain unclear, and if social robots can be effective for motivation to read for 10–11-year-olds is yet an open question. The research approach builds on UDL, Universal Design for Learning, to cater for differentiated reading literacy.

The project is a participatory co-design research project with teachers and children to systematically explore and evaluate the design and use of social robots in reading activities. In terms of theory, a novel combination of socio-cognitive and embodied aesthetic approaches to reading is employed.