Socially Assistive Robotics optimizing Augmented Reality Educational Application for Teaching Traffic Safety in Kindergarten.

Traffic safety education is the key to safe road behavior and can prevent severe and fatal accidents, and it is suggested starting from an early age. Technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) have been successfully used in the last years in the educational field. Therefore, it is essential to identify how social robots and AR educational tools can be optimally used to support traffic safety education. In this paper, we introduce the idea of an educational approach with the combination of SAR with AR technologies to teach traffic safety in kindergarten. We have been inspired by evidence from human-robot interaction studies, suggesting both technologies can enhance gained knowledge using the storytelling method at an early age and trigger positive attitudes in the students after interacting with them. Our educational approach was benchmarked against a single AR application. Our study initially proved, through real-world experiments, that the combination of SAR and AR was successfully used to teach kindergarten students about traffic safety. It managed to sustain their attention for statistically significantly more time than the case of the single AR application. Students taught by the single AR application also managed to gain basic knowledge regarding traffic safety. Moreover, another important outcome of our study is that students improved their attitudes and beliefs regarding using SAR in education after interacting with it, as demonstrated by individual interviews. Hence, our results suggest that both AR applications and SAR are suitable for learning purposes in kindergarten, while the employment of SAR in AR educational applications sustains the students’ attention.