The promise of social robot applications for children’s education has attracted growing enthusiasm over the past decade, with the potential to augment and support diverse learning outcomes. However, the adoption of education robots and their expected benefits for children are yet to be realised, due to complexity, cost, and variability between robots. Soft robots offer a possible solution. However, a concern is that these robots may be seen as less competent, decreasing their adoption and utility in learning environments. In this preregistered, mixed-methods study, we investigated teachers’ (n = 120) perception of 12 hard and soft social robots along different dimensions, learning tasks, roles, and contexts. Teachers perceived hard robots as more competent, human-like, and familiar than soft robots. Soft robots were perceived as more physically/visually warm. Hard robots were also more likely to be perceived as suitable for "technical tasks" and adopting a teacher/tutor role for supporting the learning of adults or groups. Soft robots were more likely to be evaluated as suitable for use with younger learners in individual learning contexts and playing the role of a co-learner/novice. This study provides a detailed account of how soft and hard robot features influence teachers’ perceptions of robot suitability for education applications. The findings directly inform how to optimise the design and situation of social robots to maximize adoption, effectiveness, and accessibility across diverse learners and learning contexts. By highlighting the nuanced trade-offs between competence and warmth, this research challenges theoretical assumptions that complex hard robots are universally superior in educational settings.

The potential for robots as an education support tool is being rapidly realized. However, much of the existing research with education robots has involved studies which arbitrarily select robots for interventions without a foundational understanding of the features that make them best suited to serve and meet the expectations and needs of users. This study explored how children’s perceptions, expectations and experiences were shaped by aesthetic and functional features during interactions with three different, commercially-available robot ‘reading buddies’. We collected a range of quantitative and qualitative measures of subjective experience before and after children read a book with a robot of their choice. Overall, our findings indicated that social robots do indeed show strong potential to promote reading engagement in children. This was supported by robot features that signaled the perception of robots as intelligent, literate and attentive. Such features included the robot’s ability to speak and react to the story plot in a way that was both emotionally- and temporally-appropriate, so as to engage but not distract children when reading. As such, controlling the timing of robot animations during reading activities – either using human-control methods or automation – presents a key challenge in realizing the effective deployment of robots to promote reading engagement in children, particularly for those who experience reading difficulty and associated reading anxiety.

Social motor coordination is an important mechanism responsible for creating shared understanding but can be a challenge for Autistic individuals. Social virtual reality (VR) provides an opportunity to create a safe and inclusive environment for which interactions can be augmented to promote social interactivity. Due to the bi-directional nature of social interaction and adaptation, we created a framework to explore social motor coordination with a virtual artificial agent which can exhibit human-like behaviors. In this experiment, we assessed the interactive behaviors of participants completing a collaborative problem-solving task with the agent using multidimensional cross-recurrence quantification analysis (mdCRQA). Our results show that participants who discovered novel solutions to the task exhibited greater coupling to the artificial agent regardless of participant characteristics. Future work will explore how social VR environments can be augmented to promote social coordination.