Research team: Cynthia Breazeal (far left), David DeSteno (right) and Paul Harris (far right) with the dragon robot. (Via Northwestern University. Photo by Christopher Huang.)
Teachers are always looking for new, exciting and innovative ways to make learning fun. In that spirit of thinking, researchers at Northeastern University, MIT and Harvard have created a snuggle appropriate robotic dragon that will help in the learning process. The dragon will soon be used in a test preschool setup at MIT to help test the theory that forming a bond with a “teacher” plays an important role in the educational process.
Associate professor of psychology David DeSteno elaborated, "Children tend to learn and accept information more readily from individuals that they feel bonded to, so we need to make them feel like the robot is a sentient being."
The team plans to have a child and the robot dragon seated at a table where they can interact with each other all while an operator controls the robot from a remote computer. This will be part of a $923,000 National Science Foundation-funded program to help young children learn language skills. This is hoping that the dragon plays more of an assistant to the real teacher than being the full blown teacher.
DeSteno explained more on how children can even learn social behaviors from an artificial teacher, " Certain non-verbal cues like mimicking behavior to improve rapport and social bonding, or changes in gaze direction to guide shared attention, are central. When kids learn from human teachers, these cues enhance the learning. We’re designing our new dragon robots to be able to have these capabilities.”
Since the robot is controllable over the internet, children who live in remote areas could take advantage of this opportunity to use this dragon as a learning tool in their home as researchers monitor the effectiveness of a “distance-learning” device.
The bot is controlled by a human operator, so, the students are still being taught by a real person. This seems more like an experiment in telepresence.
Eavesdropper
