Search for: All records

Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children’s learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children’s learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3–5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children’s learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms. 

Children’s early numerical knowledge establishes a foundation for later development of mathematics achievement and playing linear number board games is effective in improving basic numeri- cal abilities. Besides the visuo-spatial cues provided by traditional number board games, learning companion robots can integrate multi-sensory information and offer social cues that can support children’s learning experiences. We explored how young children experience sensory feedback (audio and visual) and social expressions from a robot when playing a linear number board game, “RoboMath.” We present the interaction design of the game and our investigation of children’s (n = 19, aged 4) and parents’ experiences under three conditions: (1) visual-only, (2) audio-visual, and (3) audio- visual-social robot interaction. We report our qualitative analysis, including the themes observed from interviews with families on their perceptions of the game and the interaction with the robot, their child’s experiences, and their design recommendations.