Learning English words with the aid of an autonomous care-receiving robot in a children's group activity

We studied educational support delivered through a care-receiving robot (CRR) in a children's group activity intended to promote the learning of English words by teaching the robot. Our prior study investigated the feasibility of the CRR for providing educational support in a situation where a child played with the robot by him/herself. Our research uncovered several impactful effects of the CRR for enhancing childhood education. However, the results were not sufficient to confirm more practical contributions of the CRR toward learning. In this paper, we report on a field experiment we conducted with a group of children at a Japanese kindergarten aged 5-6 years. Our goal was to verify the feasibility of an autonomous CRR for facilitating the learning of English words in an educational setting that closely resembled reality. The experiment was conducted on a group of roughly seven children who participated in an animal gesture game with the robot for four days to learn six English words/names for animals. There were a total of 15 participants, and we held two experimental sessions. In order to compare the educational effects between learning with the aid of the CRR and with an expert robot, both robots were introduced concurrently into classrooms. The experimental results showed that the autonomous CRR was more effective in promoting English vocabulary acquisition among preschoolers compared to the expert robot.