ERIKA – Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age. Schiffer, S. & Ferrein, A. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2018.
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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 implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents.
@Article{ Schiffer:Ferrein:MTI2018:ERiKA,
  author       = {Schiffer, Stefan and Ferrein, Alexander},
  title        = {ERIKA -- Early Robotics Introduction at Kindergarten Age},
  journal      = {Multimodal Technologies and Interaction},
  year         = {2018},
  volume       = {2},
  number       = {4},
  article-number = {64},
  url          = {http://www.mdpi.com/2414-4088/2/4/64},
  issn         = {2414-4088},
  abstract     = {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 implement a strongly
                  interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being
                  exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to
                  the children, they were very excited and at the same
                  time very concentrated. We got very positive
                  feedback from the children as well as from their
                  educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one
                  of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not
                  as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself
                  in order to engage pre-school children with complex
                  robotics contents.},
  doi          = {10.3390/mti2040064},
}

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