In a new research project about robots with wear a reflective vest in school children should get acting teacher to a robot programmed as "the ideal student" - that is curious, inquisitive and want to know and understand everything. Those children learn well by teaching to others already known. Now University West to find out if the robot's learning behavior can "rub off" on the children.
Robots have begun to make entry into the classroom, not to replace the teacher but as a tool or an assistant to the teacher. The most common is that the robot is used in engineering degrees where students program robots to learn programming craftsmanship.
The project START - Student Tutor and Robot Tutee - is instead about younger students in elementary school where the robot works as a learning buddy of children. The robot acts the children's friend and apprentice, and the child's job are to teach the robot a specific task, in this case playing a math game. The child learns the robot by demonstrating how to play, and the robot asks questions that are directly related to the child's behavior in the game. The aim is that children themselves get a better understanding of the mathematics of the game by acting teacher and try to teach the robot to play well. In addition, the robot acts as the "ideal Apprentice" and makes curious, reflective why-questions of mathematics that encourages children to think about their own knowledge and understanding. That's all the time the child who has the final say and decides what they come up with in its reasoning.
- The robot works that way as a model for how the "ideal student" behavior by being curious, reflect, on key concepts and phenomena, to explain himself, summarize and check regularly with their teacher, says Lena Pareto in reflective clothing, principal researcher at University West.
Tediously research underlying the project is based on previous research in learning where the child instead can teach an educational computer agent, who really just a computer and displayed as a face image on the screen.
- Already this form of learning buddy creates a positive impact on students' mathematical thinking and conceptual understanding, but a robot should have great potential to enhance these learning effects significantly, says Lena Pareto himself engaged in this type of research, among other things, to construct math game checkered family.
The reasons for the positive effects, according to Lena that the robot has a physical form, can be programmed into a social, empathic behavior, and can speak and understand spoken language.
- We will explore these benefits can be realized in a real classroom environment.
The project aims to stimulate and support the child's learning; the robot is only a means to achieve it. The objective is achieved by designing an efficient robot apprentice and improves the learning experience by combining game based query and learning. The hope is that the robot also serves as a behavioral model so that children imitate the robot's behavior to the benefit of their learning in all future learning situations.
This three-year project was recently awarded nearly 4 million from the Marcus and Amelia Wallenberg Memorial Fund. University safety vest, by Lena Pareto, is the project and carried out in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg.
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