Teachers' Perspective on Robots Inclusion in Education - A Case Study in Norway

In this study, two teachers in a Norwegian school participated to provide their perspectives on the three-day workshop conducted for Grade 6 students about human-robot interaction (HRI) for learning. The workshop was performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers who observed students' behavior during the HRI workshop were interviewed to understand their attitudes towards the use of social robots in educational settings and their perceptions about how the students experienced this. A semi-structured interview was conducted to explore the attitudes and perceptions of the teachers. After performing thematic analysis of the interview data, the study concludes that the robotics learning setup might not be suitable for all subjects. For example, our data analysis reveals that the use of social robots is more suited to Programming, but it is not so well suited for Mathematics; The teachers perceived that the students were happy about their session with social robots, but teachers were concerned that their excitement may fade away with time. In addition, there were concerns over the practicalities of having social robots in class.