Pierre Dillenbourg

Pierre Dillenbourg
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne | EPFL · Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction (CHILI)

MS Education; PhD Computer Science

About

494
Publications
245,944
Reads
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24,054
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 1988 - September 1989
Lancaster University
Position
  • PhD Student
September 1986 - August 1988
University of Mons
Position
  • Research Assistant
January 2005 - December 2012
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

Publications

Publications (494)
Article
Full-text available
When designing social robots for educational settings, there is often an emphasis on domain knowledge. This presents challenges: 1) Either robots must autonomously acquire domain knowledge, a currently unsolved problem in HRI, or 2) the designers provide this knowledge implying re-programming the robot for new contexts. Recent research explores alt...
Article
Full-text available
The Dynamilis project examines and addresses elementary school students’ challenges with handwriting. Dynamilis is an evidence-based digital tool developed by School Rebound based on research done in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The tool uses artificial intelligence to create children’s complete h...
Preprint
Full-text available
Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children's behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social robots and children's reluctance to inconvenience others to influence children's behaviours. Unlike tradition...
Article
Full-text available
Teachers’ self-efficacy in managing classrooms is an important consideration when it comes to bringing educational robots to classrooms. Orchestration tools support teachers by providing awareness indicators of students’ progress as well as levers to control the flow of the lesson. We designed and evaluated the impact of an orchestration tool for a...
Article
Full-text available
Task-specific training constitutes a core element for evidence-based rehabilitation strategies targeted at improving upper extremity activity after stroke. Its combination with additional treatment strategies and neurotechnology-based solutions could further improve patients' outcomes. Here, we studied the effect of gamified robot-assisted upper li...
Chapter
In a group, the collective dynamics is governed by the interactions between individuals, which can manifest differently depending on the available means of communication. In this paper, we compare 3 conditions of communication affordances (global chat, local chat and no chat) in an online multiplayer game and investigate their effect on team perfor...
Article
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The learning process depends on the nature of the learning environment, particularly in the case of open-ended learning environments, where the learning process is considered to be non-linear. In this paper, we report on the findings of employing a multimodal Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based methodology to investigate the temporal learning processes...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents our approach to predicting future error-related events in a robot-mediated gamified physical training activity for stroke patients. The ability to predict future error under such conditions suggests the existence of distinguishable features and separated class characteristics between the casual gameplay state and error prune sta...
Conference Paper
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Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others’ spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first step towards understanding children’s perspective-taking abilities and their tendency to adapt t...
Article
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Understanding the way learners engage with learning technologies, and its relation with their learning, is crucial for motivating design of effective learning interventions. Assessing the learners’ state of engagement, however, is non-trivial. Research suggests that performance is not always a good indicator of learning, especially with open-ended...
Book
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The International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training (IJRVET) is a double blind peer-reviewed journal for VET-related research. All articles published in 2021 are included in this book. IJRVET is the official journal of VETNET (founded in 1996), the European Research Network in Vocational Education and Training (umbrella or...
Article
Full-text available
In educational HRI, it is generally believed that a robots behavior has a direct effect on the engagement of a user with the robot, the task at hand and also their partner in case of a collaborative activity. Increasing this engagement is then held responsible for increased learning and productivity. The state of the art usually investigates the re...
Article
The AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution and the COVID-19 pandemic have one important thing in common: they both have caused significant and rapid changes to the skill set landscape of various industries. These disruptive forces mean that the early identification of the newly rising skills in a labour market — which we call its “emerging skills”...
Presentation
In this study, we explored the use of virtual reality (VR) for the training of apprentice gardeners in vocational education.. Using a 2x2 crossover design with apprentice gardeners from Swiss vocational schools, we investigated how using a VR garden-design application affected the quality of the designs that the students created when compared to st...
Article
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Context: Exploring the design space is an important process in a design task. In this study, we considered design space exploration for the learners in vocational education and training (VET). The goal of the study was to investigate how they explore the design space while focusing on the effect of a graph-like interface on the learner’s understand...
Article
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Writing disorders are frequent and impairing. However, social robots may help to improve children's motivation and to propose enjoyable and tailored activities. Here, we have used the Co-writer scenario in which a child is asked to teach a robot how to write via demonstration on a tablet, combined with a series of games we developed to train specif...
Article
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Do handwriting skills transfer when a child writes in two different scripts, such as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets? Are our measures of handwriting skills intrinsically bound to one alphabet or will a child who faces handwriting difficulties in one script experience similar difficulties in the other script? To answer these questions, 190 childre...
Article
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Virtual reality (VR) may be useful for situating school-based vocational education in work-life by simulating a work situation such that learners viewing this VR work situation are located inside it. The reason for this assumption is that VR can fully spatially include its viewer. Research on the utility of viewer-including VR work situations for l...
Conference Paper
A swarm is the coherent behavior that emerges ubiquitously from simple interaction rules between self-organized agents. Understanding swarms is of utmost importance in many disciplines and jobs, but hard to teach due to the elusive nature of the phenomenon, which requires to observe events at different scales (i.e., from different perspectives) and...
Preprint
Full-text available
A key element for the success of any game is its ability to produce a different experience at each round, thus keeping the player engagement high. This is particularly important for those games that also have a serious objective, such as gamified rehabilitation systems, aiming at encouraging patients in performing home rehabilitation exercises. In...
Article
Full-text available
This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical objectives about language learning. Teachers are not necessarily trained to teach the new alp...
Article
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In classrooms, some transitions between activities impose (quasi-)synchronicity, meaning there is a need for learners to move between activities at the same time. To make real-time decisions about when to move to the next activity, teachers need to be able to balance the progress of their students as they work at different paces. In this paper, we...
Article
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Handwriting is a complex skill to acquire and it requires years of training to be mastered. Children presenting dysgraphia exhibit difficulties automatizing their handwriting. This can bring anxiety and can negatively impact education. 280 children were recruited in schools and specialized clinics to perform the Concise Evaluation Scale for Childre...
Chapter
Educational Robots are gaining popularity in classrooms but can increase the load on teachers compared to the use of more traditional technologies. Providing support to teachers can make teachers confident in including robots in their teaching routines. In order to support teachers in managing robotic activities in the classroom, it is important to...
Chapter
Full-text available
This research is situated in a specialized context offering a rarely occurring opportunity for research questions and technical objectives about language acquisition. The Kazakh language transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet in Kazakhstan raises challenges to teach the whole population to write and read in the new script. We propose an unique...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A key element for the success of any game is its ability to produce a different experience at each round, thus keeping the player engagement high. This is particularly important for those games that also have a serious objective, such as gamified rehabilitation systems, aiming at encouraging patients in performing home rehabilitation exercises. In...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Humanoid robots, with a focus on personalised social behaviours, are increasingly being deployed in educational settings to support learning. However, crafting pedagogical HRI designs and robot interventions that have a real, positive impact on participants' learning, as well as effectively measuring such impact, is still an open challenge. As a fi...
Conference Paper
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Collaborative learning appears in a joint intellectual efforts of individuals to understand an object of knowledge collectively. In their search for understanding the problems, meanings, and solutions, learners employ different multi-modal strategies. In this work, we explore the role of force feedback in learners interaction with tangible hand-hel...
Article
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Immersive virtual reality (IVR) offers possibilities of creating a learner‐centric environment that can provide more presence and engagement for students leading to an enhanced learning experience compared to conventional classroom practices. However, the potential of IVR in vocational education and training (VET) has not yet been explored in‐depth...
Article
Full-text available
As robots are entering into educational fields to enhance children’s learning, it becomes relevant to explore different methods of learning in the area of child–robot interaction. In this article, we present an autonomous educational system incorporating a social robot to enhance children’s handwriting skills. The system provides a one-to-one learn...
Chapter
Full-text available
Perspective taking is an important skill to have and learn, which can be applied in many different domains and disciplines. While the ability to recognize other’s perspective develops in humans from childhood and solidifies during school years, it needs to be developed in robotic and artificial agents’ cognitive framework. In our quest to develop a...
Article
Purpose Within higher education, there was an abrupt shift from face-to-face to online lecturing with the introduction of social distancing measures in light of a global pandemic. The purpose of this study is to enrich the connection between students and instructors, the authors integrated elaborated interactive activities into large online lecture...
Article
Improving educational practice through reflection is one important focus of teacher professional development approaches. However, such teacher reflection operates under practical classroom constraints that make it happen infrequently, including the reliance on disruptive peer/supervisor observations or recordings. This article describes three desig...
Article
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The interaction with the various learners in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is often complex. Contemporary MOOC learning analytics relate with click-streams, keystrokes and other user-input variables. Such variables however, do not always capture users’ learning and behavior (e.g., passive video watching). In this paper, we present a study wit...
Article
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Background: An increasing lifespan and the resulting change in our expectations of later life stages are dependent on a good health state. This emphasizes the importance of the development of strategies to further strengthen healthy aging. One important aspect of good health in later life stages is sustained skilled motor function. Objective: Here,...
Conference Paper
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For the full presentation and audio, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRBnVcBluo
Article
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In this article we investigate the role of interactive haptic-enabled tangible robots in supporting the learning of cursive letter writing for children with attention and visuomotor coordination issues. We focus on the two principal aspects of handwriting that are linked to these issues: Visual perception and visuomotor coordination. These aspects,...
Article
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This paper proposes new ways to assess handwriting, a critical skill in any child's school journey. Traditionally, a pen and paper test called the BHK test (Concise Evaluation Scale for Children's Handwriting) is used to assess children's handwriting in French-speaking countries. Any child with a BHK score above a certain threshold is diagnosed as...
Chapter
Robots bring a new potential for embodied learning in classrooms. With our project, we aim to ease the task for teachers and to show the worth of tangible manipulation of robots in educational contexts. In this article, we present the design and the evaluation of two pedagogical activities prepared for a primary school teacher and targeting common...
Article
Full-text available
A large body of research suggests that tangible robots could indeed be useful for supporting children in learning handwriting. However, few studies have investigated the role and use of robots in teaching handwriting to children with attention and/or visuo-motor coordination difficulties. Over the course of multiple iterations, globally involving 1...
Article
Full-text available
Project JUSThink has a double goal: (i), to help train the Computational Thinking skills of children with a collaborative, robot-mediated activity, (ii), to acquire insights about how children detect and solve misunderstandings, and what keeps them engaged with a task, the partner or a robot. The result? An abstract reasoning task with a few pedago...
Article
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In this paper, we present a response to the Interest-Driven Creator (IDC) theory from a European perspective. Specifically, we raise six questions intended to start a dialog with respect to IDC theory’s placement in existing learning theories, its adoption in educational systems, and how it can be influenced by emerging learning technologies and di...