Trial of Using Robotic Pet as Human Interface of Multimedia Education System for Pre-school Aged Child in Kindergarten

Robotic pet was introduced into kindergarten class work for 4-6 aged children in order to investigate the capability of the robotic pet as the human interface of multimedia educational contents using various multimedia digital devices, and find the keys for developing the multimedia education method to enrich early childhood education. The final goal of this study is to help a child healthy mental develop by enriched moral education and intellectual training as the early childhood education by using various digital multimedia devices, and robotic pet as the interactive human interface. In this work, robotic pet, "AIBO" (ERS-311B; SONY-ERC) was used alone for the first step of this study in order to evaluate ability, fascination as the human interface to child. Child's interest, which is important to derive positive learning attitude toward class activity, was evaluated by counting of the number of raising their hands as the affirmative response of question about robot. Videotaping by DV-camcorder is also applied to find any problems during session. Most of children were much interested in robot, but some problems of using a robot in a classroom of kindergarten were found. We propose the model of multimedia education system using robotic pet as the human interface to enrich moral education and intellectual training as for early childhood education