Significant work has been devoted to the design of artificial tutors with human capabilities with the aim of helping increase the efficiency achieved with a human instructor. Yet, these systems still lack the personal, empathic and human elements that characterise a traditional teacher and fail to engage and motivate students in the same way a human teacher does. In this presentation I will discuss the EMOTE project, which aims to design, develop and evaluate a new generation of artificial embodied tutors that have perceptive capabilities to engage in empathic interactions with learners in a shared physical space. I will focus primarily on the design and evaluation of the educational value of the robotic tutor for which researcher at the University of Gothenburg are responsible.