The Robotic Preschool of the Future: New Technologies for Learning and Play (original) (raw)

THE ROLE OF ROBOTICS TECHNOLOGIES IN PRESCHOOL

Turkophone, 2024

Mother tongue education follows a distinct set of principles, with pivotal considerations including the individual's age and their mental, biological, and linguistic (healthy) development. It is noteworthy that robotics technology plays a crucial role in enhancing the development, creativity, and technical and social problemsolving skills of students with special needs. Despite the revolutionary nature of employing robots, it remains an evolving field. The central inquiry in this study is: What enhancements do the increasingly technologized educational systems, particularly those incorporating robotics, bring to children with special needs in the 21st century? Additionally, what possibilities does robotized mother tongue education present for the advancement of these children? This study contends that, notwithstanding its costliness and associated risks, such as the potential for fostering addiction, robotic materials play a supportive role in the mother tongue acquisition processes of individuals with special needs. This support is facilitated through diverse activities, including oral reading, audio-visual assistance, and mechanisms involving question-answer or action-command. It is noteworthy that this document analysis-based study aims to enrich the literature, particularly in areas where the subject of mother tongue development in children with special needs through robotic applications has been relatively unexplored.

Humanoid robots supporting children’s learning in an early childhood setting

British Journal of Educational Technology

This qualitative study explored the affordances provided by the integration of the NAO humanoid robot in three preschool classrooms. Using the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework as a lens, the researchers qualitatively analyzed data from focus groups, observations, field notes and student artifacts, using grounded coding to uncover language and communication, physical, cognitive and social-emotional learning experiences for children. The researchers also examined interactions between the robot, children and teachers to identify successes and challenges experienced during the integration. Findings indicate the robot provided opportunities for student development in all learning domains. Students were intellectually curious about the robot; data showed their eagerness to "talk with," generate questions about, make eye contact with and learn more about the robot. Students viewed these interactions as twoway. The presence of the robot created much enthusiasm and excitement, resulting in the opportunity for students to practice waiting their turn and cooperation. Challenges uncovered show that teachers lacked experience and knowledge in the integration and operation of the robot. Despite these challenges, findings show that teachers welcomed the robot as a tool in the classroom to align with curriculum requirements and meet the developmental needs of children.

ERIKA – Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age

2018

In this work we report on our effort to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age.  The humanoid robot Pepper, which is a great platform for human-robot interaction experiments, was presenting the lecture by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability.  One of the main challenges of this effort was to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents  they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. Besides the thrill being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot i...

Robotics in child storytelling

2009

Although the field of Educational Robotics (ER) has been growing over the last few years and its usefulness has been shown in many studies, its use in basic or elementary school levels has been scarce. This work intends to address the issue of demonstrating that ER makes a very useful tool at the elementary levels of learning, proposing a project-oriented approach, where interdisciplinary work uses children's stories and their imagination.

Robots and Robotics Kits for Early Childhood and First School Age

International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM)

Educational robotics can consider one of the newest trends in education and they have been introduced into the classrooms ranging from kindergarten through high school as a means of enriching the learning environment and promote knowledge-building activities. Especially, robotics technologies offer opportunities for young age children, for a practical, hands-on understanding of the things they meet in their daily life but do not fully understand, such as proximity sensors, motion detectors, and light sensors, reasoning failures (software bugs) and connection problems (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth disconnection). In this article, we presented robots that can be used in early childhood and first primary classes of education. The purpose of this article is not to advocate against an educational robot or robotic kit but indeed to inform the educational community so that to make informed decisions regarding the introduction of this kind of technology into the classroom.

The near future of children's robotics

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Robotics is a multidisciplinary and highly innovative field. Recently, multiple and often minimally connected sub-communities of child-robot interaction have started to emerge, variously focusing on the design issues, engineering, and applications of robotic platforms and toolkits. Despite increasing public interest in robots, including robots for children, child-robot interaction research remains highly fragmented and lacks regular cross-disciplinary venues for discussion and dissemination. This workshop will bring together researchers with diverse scientific backgrounds. It will serve as a venue in which to reflect on the current circumstances in which child-robot research is conducted, articulate emerging and "near future" challenges, and discuss actions and tools with which to meet those challenges and consolidate the field.

Pre-robot: an open-source educational robotics platform for preschoolers

2019

Educational robotics represent a novel and attractive scenario for stimulating different abilities frequently related to science, technology, engineering, and math. To this extent, there exist multiple approaches depending on the specific ability being tackled, and resources needed such as physical equipment or computational tools. Commercial platforms, as well as open-source educational kits, have made extensive contributions in diminishing coding abilities required for specifying desired behavior on the physical agent, such as programming through block sequences or embedding a smartphone or tablet for more intuitive uses. This work describes prototyping specifications for a novel open-source robot aimed to foster computational thinking abilities on preschool children, including a first approach involved on the built platform, with an embedded processing unit for not requiring any further equipment, and work on development for minimizing costs. Introduction In search of stimulating...

ERIKA—Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction

In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to impleme...

Child–Robot Interaction in Education

2017

Advances in the field of robotics in recent years have enabled the deployment of robots in a multitude of settings, and it is predicted that this will continue to increase, leading to a profound impact on society in the future. This thesis takes its starting point in educational robots; specifically the kind of robots that are designed to interact socially with children. Such robots are often modeled on humans, and made to express and/or perceive emotions, for the purpose of creating some social or emotional attachment in children. This thesis presents a research effort in which an empathic robotic tutor was developed and studied in a school setting, focusing on children's interactions with the robot over time and across different educational scenarios. With support from the Responsible Research and Innovation Framework, this thesis furthermore sheds light on ethical dilemmas and the social desirability of implementing robots in future classrooms, seen from the eyes of teachers and students. The thesis concludes that children willingly follow instructions from a robotic tutor, and they may also develop a sense of connection with robots, treating them as social actors. However, children's interactions with robots often break down in unconstrained classroom settings when expectations go unmet, making the potential gain of robots in education questionable. From an ethical perspective, there are many open questions regarding stakeholders' concerns on matters of privacy, roles and responsibility, as well as unintended consequences. These issues need to be dealt with when attempting to implement autonomous robots in education on a larger scale.