Designing for robot-mediated interaction among culturally and linguistically diverse children

Yanghee Kim,Sherry Marx,Hung Viet Pham,Tung Nguyen

doi:10.1007/s11423-021-10051-2

Abstract

This qualitative study explored the design and implementation of a humanoid social robot that mediated collaborative interactions among culturally and linguistically diverse kindergarten children in a US school. The robotic mediation was designed to help children have positive interactions with one another. The study was grounded in theories of childhood development, intercultural communication, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Design research and ethnographic qualitative research methods were used to design, test, and improve the robot’s mediation skills over a ten-week period of active use in a real-world classroom setting. Findings describe the challenges we faced in designing robot-mediated interaction activities as well as the solutions we implemented through repeated ethnographic observations, summarized as (1) anticipating children’s communication styles with flexible design, (2) inviting children to participate with personalized, friend-like communication, (3) enhancing engagement with familiar contexts, and (4) embracing language diversity with a bilingual robot.

Highlights

In the United States, students whose home language is not English make up about 21% of the current K-12 school-age population (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2016)
This paper presents data gathered during the first year of an exploratory multiyear design research project in which we designed and tested robot-mediated interaction activities for children iteratively
Our findings focus on a series of design challenges and the solutions we implemented to solve them while supporting collaborative interactions among the children

Summary

Introduction

In the United States, students whose home language is not English make up about 21% of the current K-12 school-age population (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2016). These students tend to score lower than their native English-speaking peers in all subject areas measured nationally (Kena et al, 2015). The resources to assist young children with their cultural and social integration, are not readily available for many children in public school. We designed a social robot to facilitate positive, collaborative interactions among culturally and linguistically diverse children with the goal of assuaging some of the negative experiences diverse children can experience in school

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion