Robots to the rescue for children and their reading

Meeting key learning targets in primary school is important, and the early years are the best time to give some children extra help if they fall behind in literacy milestones. Enter robots, who researchers have found can act as a reading companion.

One in three Australian children can’t read proficiently, or eight children in every classroom of 24 students.

To help combat this issue, Flinders research, led by Associate Professor Nathan Caruana put social robots on trial as reading assistants or companions for 35 children aged five to nine years old to assess the youngsters’ needs and responses.

Responses from the five children with poor reading, and 30 with typical reading skills, reported benefits from the robotic helpers, including for encouragement and emotional support to boost their confidence.

“If these social robots are tailored to the children’s individual needs and expectations, they have the best chance of benefiting young readers, particularly those with reading difficulties or anxiety,” says Associate Professor Caruana, from the Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Associate Professor Caruana says the children in this study designed robots that could deliver reading-specific support alongside more general emotional support.

“Key functional features and capabilities included prosocial behaviours (smiling, play and conversation), breadth of knowledge that assumed access to information about many topics, including core academic skills (reading and mathematics). Key aesthetic features included colourful, compact and customisable designs.”

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Led by the Human, Artificial & Virtual Interactive Cognition (HAVIC) Lab at Flinders University – with colleagues from the Social Brain Sciences Lab at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University – the study supports a growing understanding of robotic assistants in education settings and beyond.

The authors claim it is critically important to understand which design features make robots most likely to be accepted by children and to deliver benefits in education contexts.

“These findings have implications for the design and implementation of social robots to support reading and suggest that children are very much open to interacting with reading robot companions,” says Associate Professor Caruana.

“Codesign is imperative for guiding effective, intuitive and safe designs and deployment of robots – particularly for use with and by children.

“Additional codesigned research should examine how robot form and function can maximise emotional support and give rise to optimal psychosocial conditions for children to engage in reading and other learning activities.”

With key industry partners, the HAVIC Lab is currently conducting a number of applied studies exploring how humans perceive and interact with social robots in various settings, including education and manufacturing.

The HAVIC Lab is affiliated with the Flinders Factory of the Future and is a founding partner of the Flinders Autism Research Initiative.