Designing the future of education:From tutor robots to intelligent playthings

Robots exhibiting social behaviors have shown promising effects on children’s education. Like many analogue and digital educational devices in the past, robotic technology brings concerns along with opportunities for innovation. Tutor robots in the classroom are not meant to replace teachers, but to complement existing curricula with personalized learning experiences and one-on-one tutoring. The educational paradigm of tutor robots have insofar limited to replicate models from formal education, but many are the technical, ethical and de- sign challenges to bring this paradigm forward. Moreover, the educational paradigm of tutor robots de-facto perpetuates the exclusion of playful learning by doing with peers and objects, which is arguably the most important aspect of children’s upbringing and, yet, themost overlooked in formal education. Increasingly, robotics applications to children’s education are shifting from tutor-like paradigm to an intelligent playthings paradigm: to promote active, open-ended and independent learning through play with peers. This article is an invitation to reflect on the role that robotic technology, especially tutor robots and intelligent playthings, could play for children’s learning and development. The complexity of designing for children’s learning highlights the necessity to start a trans-disciplinary discussion to shape the future of education and foster a positive societal impact of robots for children’s learning

TWITTER: UN’ANALISI DELL’ITALIANO NEL MICRO BLOGGING

Il contributo è incentrato su un’analisi linguistica dell’italiano scritto nella piattaforma sociale e di micro blogging Twitter. Attraverso alcuni esempi estrapolati da un corpus di 2.150 di messaggi, chiamati tweet, si cerca di definire la tipologia testuale e di individuare i tratti sintattici e lessicali salienti del micro blogging. In particolare ci si sofferma su quelle dinamiche micro sintattiche auto generate dall’utenza (@reply, @mention, retweet) e su quei tratti lessicali di organizzazione e costruzione di significato e senso condiviso (hashtag) che concorrono a far emergere, tramite una dinamica “conversazionale - collaborativa” (definita tweetonomy), quella che si potrebbe definire una ”grammatica di Twitter”.TWITTER: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE IN MCRO BLOGGINGThe following paper is a linguistic analysis of Italian language use in Twitter, a well-known micro blogging and social awareness platform.The main purpose describe and define the Italian Twitter texting genre in terms of syntax and vocabulary, providing several examples taken from a corpus of 2.150 tweets.The analysis focus on user-generated micro syntax forms (@reply, @mention, retweet) and on user-generated conversational tagging (hashtags) which seem to create, through collaborative-conversational dynamics (aka tweetonomy), a sort of “Twitter grammar”

Exploring child-robot engagement in a collaborative task

Imagine a room with toys scattered on the floor and a robot that is motivating a small group of children to tidy up. This scenario poses real-world challenges for the robot, e.g., the robot needs to navigate autonomously in a cluttered environment, it needs to classify and grasp objects, and it needs to interact with the children and adapt its behaviors to the children's group dynamics. Within the EU FP7 project SQUIRREL, we aim to address these challenges and develop a robot for children (4-10 years old) that cannot only perform complex navigation and manipulation tasks in a cluttered environment, but is also affectively and socially intelligent, engaging and fun in a collaborative task. We currently focus on designing appropriate robot interaction styles for a small group of children and evaluating the levels of fun and engagement in child-robot and child-child interactions

Help-Giving Robot Behaviors in Child-Robot Games:Exploring Semantic Free Utterances

We present initial findings from an experiment where we used Semantic Free Utterances vocalizations and sounds without semantic content as an alternative to Natural Language in a child-robot collaborative game. We tested (i) if two types of Semantic Free Utterances could be accurately recognized by the children; (ii) what effect the type of Semantic Free Utterances had as part of help-giving behaviors with in situ child-robot interaction. We discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of Semantic Free Utterances for child-robot interaction

2nd Workshop on Evaluating Child Robot Interaction

Many researchers have started to explore natural interaction scenarios for children. No matter if these children are normally developing or have special needs, evaluating Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) is a challenge. To find methods that work well and provide reliable data is difficult, for example because commonly used methods such as questionnaires donot work well particularly with younger children. Previous research has shown that children need support in expressing how they feel about technology. Given this, researchers often choose time-consuming behavioral measures from observations to evaluate CRI. However, these are not necessarily comparable between studies and robots. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from differentdisciplines to share their experiences on these aspects. The main topics are methods to evaluate child-robot interaction design, methods to evaluate socially assistive child-robot interaction and multi-modal evaluation of child-robot interaction. Connected questions that we would like to tackle are for example: i) What are reliable metrics in CRI' ii) How can we overcome the pitfalls of survey methods in CRI' iii) How can we integrate qualitative approaches in CRI' iv) What are the best practices for in the wild studies with children? Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we want to discuss advantages and short-comings of using different evaluation methods in order to compile guidelines for future CRI research. This workshop is the second in a series that started at the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2015

Vocal turn-taking patterns in groups of children performing collaborative tasks: an exploratory study

Since children (5-9 years old) are still developing their emotional and social skills, their social interactional behaviors in small groups might differ from adults' interactional behaviors. In order to develop a robot that is able to support children performing collaborative tasks in small groups, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of how children interact with each other. We were interested in investigating vocal turn-taking patterns as we expect these to reveal relations to collaborative and conflict behaviors, especially with children behaviors as previous literature suggests. To that end, we collected an audiovisual corpus of children performing collaborative tasks together in groups of three. Through automatic turn-taking analyses, our results showed that speaker changes with overlaps are more common than without overlaps and children seemed to show smoother turn-taking patterns, i.e., less frequent and longer lasting speaker changes, during collaborative than conflict behaviors