Mental state attribution to educational robots: an experience with children in primary school

The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of the project Girls and boys: one day at university promoted by the City of Turin together with the University of Turin. We were responsible for two educational activities on i) robotics and ii) coding hosted at the Computer Science Department, which made one of its laboratories available for this kind of lesson. At the conclusion of the lab's sessions, children compiled the Attribution of Mental State (AMS) questionnaire, which is a measure of mental states that participants attribute to robots, namely the user's perception of the robot's mental qualities as compared to humans. We distributed the questionnaires both to children attending the educational robotics lab and to children performing coding activities. Results show that the first group attributed higher mental qualities to the robots, compared to the attribution given by children that did not have a direct experience with a robot.