One of my courses has recently started using a robot helper during lab practice sessions (part of a PhD research into how viable robot classroom helpers are for technical fields).
I can't say it's flawless but it is definitely interesting to interact with it. There's quite a lot of relatively minor hiccups especially in regard to how it translates voice input to answers for questions. I think it's mainly to do with parsing longer answers and how its bank of acceptable answers is built. To mitigate this there is also an option for answering based on text, where the robot gives multiple-choice questions on it's display (a tablet).
One interesting result of this is that quite a few people prefer to present their work/answers to the robot instead of the instructor because multiple-choice is a lot easier to answer when compared to open-ended questions and answers. It results in this odd outcome where the robot has a queue of people while the instructor was free.
- Stern Kittel
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