Abstract
In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-school children could follow the basic principles and ideas using examples from their world of experience. What sets apart our effort from other work is that part of the lecturing is actually done by a robot itself and that a quiz at the end of the lesson is done using robots as well. The humanoid robot Pepper from Softbank, which is a great platform for human–robot interaction experiments, was used to present a lecture on robotics by reading out the contents to the children making use of its speech synthesis capability. A quiz in a Runaround-game-show style after the lecture activated the children to recap the contents they acquired about how mobile robots work in principle. In this quiz, two LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots were used to implement a strongly interactive scenario. Besides the thrill of being exposed to a mobile robot that would also react to the children, they were very excited and at the same time very concentrated. We got very positive feedback from the children as well as from their educators. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents.
Highlights
Today’s world is increasingly characterized by technological advancements
To the best of our knowledge, this is one of only few attempts to use a robot like Pepper not as a tele-teaching tool, but as the teacher itself in order to engage pre-school children with complex robotics contents
We focus on the technical implementation of using robots to convey basic robotics concepts to pre-school children and evaluate this in a pilot run
Summary
Today’s world is increasingly characterized by technological advancements. One of the most striking components of digitalization perhaps comes in the form of the ever more popular artificial intelligence, many times appearing in different forms of embodiment, that is, as robots. In order to prepare coming generations for a future in which robots are just an integral part of every day life, we designed, implemented and conducted a teaching project for an early robotics introduction for children at kindergarten age. We thought about extending these previous excursions into pre-university education to even children in pre-school and kindergarten. The contribution of this work is more on the technical implementation and the lessons learnt. To this end, we took our basic robotics introduction course and tried to boil it down to the core principles. We first give a brief review of related work and set our effort apart from existing work in pre-school robotics education. We analyse and discuss lessons learnt from a pilot instance conducted in a local kindergarten
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