Approaching Social Robots Through Playfulness and Doing-It-Yourself: Children in Action

This work reports on a pilot study devoted to investigate whether the direct experience of building a robot by children enables them to obtain a more effective and complex learning of what a robot is. The study consists of an experiment carried out with eighteen pupils of the same age, attending a secondary school in Udine (Italy). The experiment was aimed to allow children to build up a simple robot, and in this experience, the children were supported by two researchers and by one of their teachers. The results show that this concrete experience activated in the children affective, emotional, physical, and social dimensions and brought them to the development of a more sophisticate conceptualization of robots. The learning by doing approach was quite effective also in strengthening the children’s social behavior and improving their mechanical knowledge and manual abilities.