The 22nd annual ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference was held in Chicago last week and featured some interesting and exciting design experiments of how children interact with robots. In this article, we discuss some interesting topics around studies involving the use of robots for in-home learning and helping children with slightly impaired learning abilities.
Robots as an aid to learning at home
There were multiple studies presented by researchers at the People and Robots Laboratory at University of Wisconsin-Madison which explored how the Misty II robot (Priced in the $2500 range) can be effectively used by as a learning aid by children. One of the studies focused on how the robot can prompt parents to have conversations with children around math topics. A study was performed on 9 families with children between the ages of 4 and 5. The robot helped the parent and child in a reading and …