School-Age Children Program Social Robots - World Robot Summit Pilot Study 2018

The World Robot Summit (WRS) Junior Robot Category's School Robot Challenge provides an opportunity for school-age children to learn to program the Pepper robot, a sociable humanoid robot by SoftBank Robotics, Inc. to realize their ideas for living with a social robot in school. This paper presents a pilot study examining the programming performance of the participating teams in the School Robot Challenge. The data for the study was collected from the WRS 2018 Junior Category, School Robot Challenge held in Tokyo, Japan in October 2018. Analysis of the data shows that having Pepper at a team's school does not guarantee a higher ranking in the competition. The teams without access to the Pepper robot could be successful at the competition. It is clear that prior programming experience is a factor that makes teams better able to program the humanoid robot. Further investigation is necessary to determine what contributes to the success of the teams without access to the humanoid Pepper robot prior to the competition.