Effective tutoring during skill learning requires to provide the appropriate physical assistance to the learners, but at the same time to assess and adapt to their affective state to avoid frustration. With the aim of endowing robot tutors with these abilities, we designed an experiment to evaluate how training with a humanoid social robot influenced the performance, experience, and communicative behavior of naive learners. Participants had to learn to balance an unstable inverted pendulum with the support of physical assistance. The presence of the humanoid robot increased the involvement in the task. Moreover monitoring participants’ facial expressions proved helpful to recognize when the task was particularly challenging. These findings will enable the robot to adapt its tutoring strategy to the learner’s needs in real-time

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