Abstract
Through numerous experiences, the robotics has been demonstrated to have good potential in the field of strengthening social skills in children with Special Educational Needs and in particular with autism spectrum disorder. There are still not many experimental studies on the cognitive enhancement and social skills of children with special needs conducted with robotics construction kits that, requiring both the construction of the robot body and the programming of its “mind“, bring into play a multiplicity of cognitive and social skills. For the aforementioned reasons our team from the University of Palermo and from the Center MetaIntelligenze ONLUS developed the treatment protocol RE4BES, which is a collection of guidelines for realizing robotics personalized activities for children with special needs. In this paper, two studies will be described concerning the first application of activities drawn from the RE4BES protocol. The first study concerns the use of the robotic construction kits for the stimulation of visuo-spatial abilities; in the second study the robot construction kits have been used to stimulate the attentional abilities in a child with severe difficulties on focused attention tasks.
Highlights
The term educational robotics (ER) is used to refer to the application of robotics in the educational and cognitive field
In this paper, we focus our interest in the use of robotics constructions kits as a tool for intervention in children with special needs
There were no improvements in working memory word span or short-term visual memory span, and there was a worsening in word span
Summary
The term educational robotics (ER) is used to refer to the application of robotics in the educational and cognitive field. A growing number of studies have investigated several applications of technology-based intervention with children, especially in the field of autism. Robots have been widely used in cognitive training for people with intellectual disabilities. In one of our studies, we have documented a significant improvement in academic performance and some cognitive-motivational aspects of learning in a student with intellectual disability [4]. Other studies [5] showed that cognitive abilities, such as logical reasoning and working memory, are important prerequisites for programming the sequence of actions that are needed to adapt the robot to its environment. Fridin and Yaakobi [6] have showed that robotics can help to improve memory and attention in children with ADHD
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