An Exploratory Study About the NAVS Robot Emotional Effect in Educational Contexts

Robots can have different appearance to foster the learning process. The ability of robots to show emotions could be related to the anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic characteristics. Learners can use the robot’s emotions in order to improve their learning process. The main idea is exploring the conditions to show emotions by mediational tools with emotional characteristics. This paper presents the result of our research process about the design and validation of a non-anthropomorphic robot called NAVS which expresses emotions. The experience involved 363 children ranged 9 and 14 years old. They come from the Public School called Compartir of the municipality of Soacha in Colombia. The results are simple, but it contributes to understand the recent phenomena about use emotional tools without human appearance in learning contexts.