Hitting early literacy milestones matters, and the first years of primary school are often when teachers spot students who need a little extra support.
New research led by Associate Professor Nathan Caruana at Flinders University, working with teams in Switzerland and Australia, tested whether child-friendly social robots could play a useful role. The study involved 35 children aged five to nine — some struggling with reading, others tracking typically — and looked closely at how they reacted to having a robot as a learning companion.
Interestingly, both groups said the robots helped, particularly by offering encouragement and giving them the confidence to keep going.
“If these social robots are tailored to the children’s individual needs and expectations, they have the best chance of benefiting young readers, particularly those with reading difficulties or anxiety,” Associate Professor Caruana, from the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, said.
Associate Professor Caruana, co-lead author of a new journal article, says the children in this study designed robots that could deliver reading-specific support alongside more general emotional support.
“Key functional features and capabilities included prosocial behaviours [smiling, play and conversation], breadth of knowledge that assumed access to information about many topics, including core academic skills (reading and mathematics). Key aesthetic features included colourful, compact and customisable designs.”
Led by from the Human, Artificial & Virtual Interactive Cognition Lab HAVIC Lab at Flinders University – with colleagues from the Social Brain Sciences Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University – the study supports a growing understanding of robotic assistants in education settings and beyond.
The authors claim it is critically important to understand which design features make robots most likely to be accepted by children and to deliver benefits in education contexts.
“These findings have implications for the design and implementation of social robots to support reading and suggest that children are very much open to interacting with reading robot companions,” Associate Professor Caruana said, adding that codesign is imperative for guiding effective, intuitive and safe designs and deployment of robots – particularly for use with and by children.
“Additional codesigned research should examine how robot form and function can maximise emotional support and give rise to optimal psychosocial conditions for children to engage in reading and other learning activities.”
With key industry partners, the HAVIC Lab is currently conducting a number of applied studies exploring how humans perceive and interact with social robots in various settings, including education and manufacturing.
The original version of this article was first published as a media release by Flinders University.