Tuan Pham, "User Experience in Interactive Object Learning: Pleasurable Teaching Practices with Learning Robots", University of Siegen, 2021.

While the training of learning robot systems has been implemented for various purposes and with desirable results, little emphasis has been put on motivational and experiential aspects of the human teacher. Without establishing pleasurable and engaging teaching practices, the training of an intelligent agent remains a tedious task that humans may only perform voluntarily for short periods. The main goal of this thesis is therefore to explore and identify meaningful teaching practices that turn the activity into a pleasurable pursuit for the human. Inspired by positive moments gathered from semi-structured interviews with educators, sports coaches and animal trainers, we created joyful interaction concepts for a teachable object learning robot. Subsequently, an online video vignette study (N=184) was conducted to verify changes in user perception and motivation between the seven newly devised interaction concepts and the one used so far. The survey outcome suggests that teaching experiences enriched with elements translated from existing prac- tices between humans do encourage more extensive engagement with the learning robot. Increases in positive user experience, perceived desired learner personality traits and al- terity suggest that plausible teaching interactions and frame stories allow the human teacher to better enjoy and engage with the previously unusual and artificial activity of teaching objects to a robot – e.g., by witnessing the robot seemingly putting in effort and intent to learn.