Exploring Collaborative Game Play with Robots to Encourage Good Hand Hygiene Practises among Children

TL;DR

This study introduces a collaborative educational game involving a social robot to teach children proper hand hygiene, demonstrating increased engagement but no significant difference in learning outcomes.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel robot-assisted game using CASA paradigm to promote hand hygiene among children, with detailed analysis of interaction dynamics.

Findings

Children learned good hand hygiene practices.

Pro-social robot increased social engagement.

Learning was unaffected by robot pro-sociality.

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative educational game titled "Land of Hands", involving children and a customized social robot that we designed (HakshE). Through this gaming platform, we aim to teach proper hand hygiene practises to children and explore the extent of interactions that take place between a pro-social robot and children in such a setting. We blended gamification with Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm to model the robot as a social actor or a fellow player in the game. The game was developed using Godot's 2D engine and Alice 3. In this study, 32 participants played the game online through a video teleconferencing platform Zoom. To understand the influence a pro-social robot's nudges has on children's interactions, we split our study into two conditions: With-Nudges and Without-Nudges. Detailed analysis of rubrics and video analyses of children's interactions show that our platform helped children learn good hand hygiene practises. We also found that using a pro-social robot creates enjoyable interactions and greater social engagement between the children and the robot although learning itself wasn't influenced by the pro-sociality of the robot.