Recent advances in robotic technologies enable robots to support us in our daily activities such as social interactions. Such robots, called social robots, often make us interact in more intuitive and casual ways than a real human because of the lack of nonverbal cues and demographic messages. Thanks to this characteristic, they are just beginning to be applied to various fields of social interaction such as education. In this talk, I will present the potential applications of social robots in education, introducing three aspects. First, social robots can easily change their relationship with us by playing different roles. They can become our teachers, our students, and our peers, depending on their social contexts. Second, by referring to our field experiment with a teleoperated android, I will show that they can facilitate human-human communication and can also provide opportunities for us to improve communication skills. Finally, I will present the physical embodiment of the robot that enables us to overcome our limitation to build social bonds with people and provide us with a new way of making close human relationships.
