Educational Robots : Three Models for the Research of Learning Theories and Human-Robot Interaction

In the summer of 2006, the Tulane Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department teamed up with UNO graduate students in education and developmental psychology to conduct experiments in the education of young children using robotic agents. Students from the “AI Robotics” class used the Sony AIBO robotic dog to design three different educational systems geared primarily toward young physically and mentally challenged children. We consulted with UNO graduate students concerning prekindergarten education and visited a special education institution, The Chinchuba Institute. The Chinchuba Institute educates hearingand speech-impaired children, along with children with mental disabilities. We returned with impressive results, designing three systems that focus on methods of communication with the student and usability for the student and teacher. We encountered many challenges in designing for the pre-K and K-12 classroom, such as making the robot interaction robust and intuitive to a child. Section I Introduction The applicability of robotics in an educational environment is an emerging field of study which seeks to introduce robotics into the educational system in order to further the abilities of educators to instruct students. While research in human-computer interaction has delivered methods and approaches to the design and usability testing of computer usage, it has focused mainly on graphical user interfaces or multi-modal interfaces where vision is the main component. It has left untouched issues of physical robots as companions or assistants to communicate with computers [3]. This leaves a gap between the fields of robotics and education where the robot will be directly interacting with the students or educators to aid in instruction. The robot itself can serve several roles. First, the robots can act as an instructor, thus helping an educator to affectively convey material. Second, the robot can also be the subject of learning, and third the robot can act as an assistant to the instructor. Since the field of robotics spans many disciplines working with a robot can be a wonderful learning experience. Robots ground ethereal computation to palpable physicality, and as a result they have the potential to excite and inspire children and adults in a way that desktop computers cannot[17]. In the summer of 2006 Tulane University's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department sought to find the best of both of these areas in a course entitled AI Robotics. The focus of the course was to learn about programming robots by integrating them into the educational system. The motivation for using the educational system came from the fact that there is always a shortage of good educational materials. In particular there is limited material with an ‘AI flavor’ [12]. Working with the educational system would give students access to AI and robotics at an early age. Actively involving teachers as well as prospective engineering students provides a two-fold approach for increasing the number of well-prepared students [15]. In order to accomplish this we collaborated with the Chinchuba Institute, whose mission is to educate children who are speech and language impaired. The goal was to begin the development of an application the Institute could use to aid in the education of their students. The class selected the Sony AIBO robotics platform for use with this project. The AIBO's asthetical value, along with the Remote Framework SDK, provided by Sony, made a good fit for this project. The AI Robotics class would have to learn how to program the AIBOs and then apply this to education, thus giving this class multiple facets. The first step the class took was to develop a wrapper class for the Remote Framework SDK, which is written in Microsoft Foundation C++. This allowed for bringing all the functionality of the SDK into a single class which would then be used for further development. At this point the students were split into three groups, and each would select their own emphasis in education and