This article presents the design and evaluation of a Robot Interaction Language (ROILA). This speech recognition friendly spoken artificial language is designed to be used by humans for interacting with robots. We evaluated the use of ROILA in a Dutch high school. The language was taught as a part of the science curriculum followed by a controlled experiment, where the language was compared against English. The results from the experiment showed that the ROILA performed better than English on account of both objective recognition accuracy and the subjective assessment by the students. We estimate the trade-off between this benefit in relation to the effort required to learn ROILA. In a regular usage scenario, it would pay off to use ROILA.