PRE2018 4 Group4

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Student Student Number
Anne Aarts 1026630
Rick van Beek 1243355
Bjarne Kraak 1262580
Paul van Dijk 1278347
Pelle Schram 1252089


Planning

Week Datum start ToDo/Milestones Who does it
1 29 April generate mutual understanding of the subject: plan of approach, Literature study, getting Nao robot. Getting nao robot: Anne, Literature study: everyone, wikipedia design: Pelle
2 6 May Mutual understanding and task for the robot: discuss literature study and decide what place the robot is best suited. approach schools. making of the enquête: Paul, Approach schools: Rick
3 13 May Task for the robot and approaching experts in the field: visit three schools. everyone
4 20 May Task for the robot: discuss school visits, decide the task for the robot and create a planning for the coming weeks. Everyone
5 27 May Task for the robot: Work on the task for the robot. Everyone
6 3 June Programming the robot. Programming: Rick en Bjarne
7 10 June Programming the robot and testing. Everyone
8 17 June 20 June presentation, finish wiki. Everyone


Problem statement/ introduction

With the increasing diversity in modern society and the constantly increasing expectations of work, the amount of burnouts among educators has been higher than expected. Teachers suffer from emotional exhaustion with the increasing workload, which is a cause and consequence for the demand of more teachers in every level of schooling. In the Netherlands, one out of five teachers experiences symptoms of burnout (CBS, 2015). Also, a report of the NFER shows that in England job-related stress is higher among teachers than other professionals (NFER, 2019). Burnout is the accumulation of responses to extended stressors caused by one’s job. The high amount of burnout cases among teachers is caused by several factors, such as teacher turnover: "The rate at which personnel whose primary function is classroom teaching leave or separate from the district, or change from their classroom teaching to another position from one school year to another" (Colorado Department of Education), which has not increased in spite of the growing demand for teachers. Other factors include emotional exhaustion due to the high degree of emotional involvement of the job, high workload and teacher self-efficacy (individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals). Not only does this affect the teachers themselves: students are also negatively influenced by the presence of a burned-out teacher (Herman; Hickmon-Rosa; Reinke, 2017). A solution is yet to be found; several options are being research and considered. One of those options could be an implementation of robot technology.

Nursery teachers indicated that robots could help them with decreasing the workload in two ways: taking over a part of the paper work and entertain children for a certain time (Shiomi; Hagita, 2015). Robots are more efficient than humans, and they could give every student the proper level of education they need: brightest pupils can be given additional work, while those that need additional help would receive it. However, implementation of robots in education is an important subject in ethical discussions. Robots can probably never be as good as teachers. Humans are social animals, they like to learn from other people. Teaching includes looking after the students in the class, and spotting those in need of help, robots miss the ability to inspire. On top of that, robot technology in early stages of schooling can have major effects on the social development of children.

The current attitude towards robot in education is more shifted towards a negative side. However, a study in American public schools researched the views towards the robots before and after the deployment of an autonomous social robotic learning companion (Westlund et al., 2016). Teachers generally expected the robot to be disruptive, but found that it was not, and furthermore, had numerous positive ideas about the robot's potential as a new educational tool for their classrooms. Robots have already proven to be useful in eductaion of social skills with kids with autism spectrum disorder (), which indicates that there are positive cases of robot usage in education.

In this paper, we will research the implementation of robots for the purpose of entertaining the children. The focus will be on a robot with a more supportive role than an actual replacement, as actual replacement can have many harmful effects (Feil-Seifer; Matarić, 2010). This paper focuses on in which way a robot technology can support teachers in their work by entertaining the children, in order for the workload to decreased while the level of education is not negatively influenced. An example of this could be that, when the teacher needs to take a child apart, the robot can entertain the rest of the group by telling an interactive story. More specifically, when the robot would like to introduce, for example, a bird in the story, it could wave with its arms just like a bird flutters with its wings, and ask the children what bird it mimics. When hearing the right keyword in the answer, it could respond enthusiastically and continue with its story. This way, there would be more personal attention which would probably even increase the level of education while the teacher doesn't have to entertain the whole group resulting in a decreasing work load.

Target audience: kindergarten (4-6 years). Children are in one of their primary development stages, robots can have a major influence on them.
Objectives: educational quality stays the same/improves with the use of assistive robots. Elevating stress for the teachers.


Users

We edentified the next user groups:

  • Children: Children want to be entertained.
  • Teachers: Teachers would like to see their stress relieved.
  • Parents: In order to accept robots, parents would expect at least the same quality of education from robots as from teachers.
  • Government: The government would like to have a better quality of education, without increasing the money spent on education.
  • Enterprises: Enterprises would like to see new and profitable opportunities.

Orientational Literature Study

To earn some insights on the topic of robots in childcare, a broad literature study has been performed. The problem statement as formulated in the introduction is based on the literature found. A small summary of every article is provided. The scientific articles found are divided in the next topics for easy classification:

  • Teachers and burnouts
  • Roles
  • Acceptance
  • Ethics
  • Areas
  • Technology


Teachers and burnouts
The next articles are classified under the topic 'Teachers and burnouts':

Summary: A report of the NFER shows that job-related stress is higher among teachers than other professionals.

Summary: more than 14 percent of employees in the Netherlands has had a burnout in 2014 (1:7). Among education is the highest percentage of burnouts: one out of five has to deal with it.

  • Boujut, E., Dean, A., Grouselle, A. et al. J Autism Dev Disord (2016). Comparative Study of Teachers in Regular Schools and Teachers in Specialized Schools in France, Working with Students with an Autism Spectrum Disorder: Stress, Social Support, Coping Strategies and Burnout. 46: 2874. https://doi-org.dianus.libr.tue.nl/10.1007/s10803-016-2833-2.

Summary: Study comparing teachers of regular schools and specialized schools with regard to, among others, stress and burnout. Specialized teachers are less emotionally exhausted, as they have adjustment due to their training, experience, and tailored classroom conditions.

Summary: The interest in teacher stress and burnout in Australia has been increasing steadily over the last five to ten years. In comparison to the ongoing stress research, the role of social support in helping educators cope with the stress of teaching has received methodical but limited attention. Although the research base on educator burnout and social support is expanding, there remains nonetheless the need for a more complete understanding of these phenomena.

  • Herman, K. C., Hickmon-Rosa, J., & Reinke, W. M. (2018). Empirically Derived Profiles of Teacher Stress, Burnout, Self-Efficacy, and Coping and Associated Student Outcomes. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 20(2), 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098300717732066

Summary: Understanding how teacher stress, burnout, coping, and self-efficacy are interrelated can inform preventive and intervention efforts to support teachers. This study researched this in relation to student outcomes, including disruptive behaviors and academic achievement. Teachers in the high stress, high burnout, and low coping class were associated with the poorest student outcomes. Implications for supporting teachers to maximize student outcomes are discussed.

  • J. K. Westlund et al., "Lessons from teachers on performing HRI studies with young children in schools," 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Christchurch, 2016, pp. 383-390.

Summary: an autonomous social robotic learning companion was deployed in three preschool classrooms at an American public school for two months. Before and after this deployment, the teachers and teaching assistants who worked in the classrooms are asked about their views on the use of social robots in preschool education. These teachers generally expected the robot to be disruptive, but found that it was not, and furthermore, had numerous positive ideas about the robot's potential as a new educational tool for their classrooms.


Roles
The next articles are classified under the topic roles:

  • The scenario and design process of childcare robot, PaPeRo. (Osada, Ohnaka & Sato, 2006)

Summary: Eight applications for the use of robots in childcare were looked into, concerning the development of personal robots: conversation, face recognition, touch, roll-call, quiz-master, phoning, greetings and story teller. After testing in the field, the most important conclusion was that giving a robot a personality made it more interesting for toddlers.

  • Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center. (Tanaka, Cicourel & Movellan, 2007)

Summary: This paper tried to find out whether real bonding between robots and toddlers was possible, as it was not really shown in the past. By immersing a SotA robot in in a nursery school, it was found that contact between the toddlers and the robot improved over time and they begun to more and more treat it as a human being. In this research, the robot was not operating autonomous but it is concluded that the technology available should be able to autonomous bond and socialize with human toddlers for a significant period of time.

  • Toh, L. P. E., Causo, A., Tzuo, P.-W., Chen, I.-M., & Yeo, S. H. (2016). A Review on the Use of Robots in Education and Young Children. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 19(2), 148-163. https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/handle/10220/42422

Summary: The robot's influence on children's skills development could be grouped into four major categories: cognitive, conceptual, language and social skills.

  • Should we welcome robot teachers? (Sharkey, 2016)

Summary: This article investigates robots in classrooms in four different scenario’s: a robot teacher, a robot companion/peer, a care-elicting robot and a telepresence robot. Multiple ethical issues are identified: the privacy of students, the loss of human contact, the deception of students and the question of accountability. The writer concludes that human teachers should not be replaced by robot teachers, and robots’ primary use in classrooms should be for tasks that a human teacher can’t do. In tasks the teacher normally does, the human will outperform the robot.


Acceptance
The next articles are classified under the topic acceptance:

  • Social acceptance of a childcare support robot system. (Shiomi, & Hagita, 2015)

Summary: This journal article looks into the social acceptance of robot technologies in childcare in comparison to two present childcare technologies, like baby food. Therefore, a web-based survey as well as a field test was performed. Confirming their hypothesis, the social acceptance of childcare robot system was less than of the known childcare support technologies. However, when tested in the field, the social acceptance was higher than following the web-based survey. To investigate acceptance, three points of view were used: safety and trustworthy, diligence, and decreasing workload. For designing a childcare support system, they interviewed teachers at nursery schools. They found out that there were two options where a robot could help: 1. robot system that helps with paperwork; and 2. robot system that entertains children.

  • Serholt, S. (2018). Breakdowns in children's interactions with a robotic tutor: A longitudinal study

Summary: There are some problems faced in reality with a robotic tutor four of them stood out these were (1) the robot's inability to evoke initial engagement and identify misunderstandings, (2) confusing scaffolding, (3) lack of consistency and fairness, and finally, (4) controller problems.

  • Kulviwat, S. , Bruner II, G. C., Kumar, A. , Nasco, S. A. and Clark, T. (2007), Toward a unified theory of consumer acceptance technology. Psychology & Marketing, 24: 1059-1084. doi:10.1002/mar.20196

Summary: findings suggest that substantial improvement in the prediction of technology adoption decisions is possible by use of the CAT model with its integration of affect and cognition.


Ethics
The next articles are classified under the topic ethics:

  • Additional elements on the use of robots for childcare. (Ruiz-del-Solar, 2010)

Summary: In other articles, issues like privacy, deception and psychological damage are raised concerning robots for childcare. This article contributes to that discussion. Following this article, four things should be looked in to: 1. Regulate robot usages such at with toys or some sport installations. Including informative messages could help. 2. Change the analysis based on the age of the group. Beneath 5 years, it is shown that using robots can be harmful, above, it isn't. 3. Use data stored by robots in ethical way and destroy it in the cases where the parents don't are the owner. Storing (and destroying) the data should be law enforced. 4. Receiving no care, which happens when children are left alone, is way worse than receiving robot care. Robots could be a solution to the problems that arise from being home alone often.

  • Dry your eyes: Examining the roles of robots for childcare applications. (Feil-Seifer & Matarić, 2010)

Summary: Sharkey & Sharkey (2010) rose ethical questions about using robots for childcare. The argument for this was that the use of robots could lead to social neglect of the child. For this scenario to happen, the parents and children should be convinced that the robot is more capable than it actually is. It is shown that even children see the limitations of robots in an early stage. Thus, robots may facilitate some issues, they are not specific to robots as humans are very well capable of detecting the flaws. Detecting them not is just bad parenting. The argument is based on the assumption that robots will replace human interaction. However, it is shown that robot technologies can also improve human-human interaction by supplementing it.

  • Robot Lies in Health Care: When Is Deception Morally Permissible? (Matthias, 2015)

Summary: This article deals with the ethical problem of social robots being deceptive towards humans. It concludes with four requirements that would make deception morally permissible.


Areas
The next articles are classified under the topic areas:

  • Kindergarten assistive robotics (KAR) as a tool for spatial cognition development in pre-school education. (Keren, Ben-David, Fridin, 2012)

Summary: Kindergarten Assistive Robotics (KAR) is an innovative tool that promotes children’s development through social interaction. This study describes how KAR assists kindergarten educational staff in the teaching geometrical thinking, one of the aspects of spatial cognition by engaging the children in play-like interaction. One of the purposes of the KAR system is to promote children’s motor development. KAR can also promote children’s cognitive development in preschool education, for example by storytelling. In the present study we describe the use of KAR to promote children’s geometrical thinking, one of the aspects of spatial cognition.

  • Storytelling by a kindergarten social assistive robot: A tool for constructive learning in preschool education. (Fridin, 2014)

Summary: Kindergarten Social Assistive Robotics (KindSAR) is a novel technology that offers kindergarten staff an innovative tool for achieving educational aims through social interaction. This robot served as a teacher assistant by telling prerecorded stories to small groups of children while incorporating song and motor activities in the process. Storytelling is essential for children’s development of language expression, logical thinking, imagination, and creativity. The primary purpose of KindSAR is to provide assistance to the staff by engaging the children in educational games. The technology potentially provides a valuable contribution to the existing repertoire of tools for children’s cognitive and social development. KindSAR provides children and the educational staff with detailed feedback on the game/task performance and concurrently monitors children’s progress over time. Visual, audio, and task performance data can then be used both by kindergarten teams and for further study by researchers studying cognitive development. Second, productive though it may be for educational (and research) purposes, child–teacher interaction is often limited in view of the large number of children (35) in Israeli kindergarten classes and the small number of teachers (usually 2) per class.

  • Kindergarten Social Assistive Robot (KindSAR) for children’s geometric thinking and metacognitive development in preschool education: A pilot study. (Keren, Fridin, 2014)

Summary: Kindergarten Social Assistive Robot (KindSAR) is an innovative tool promotes children’s development through social interaction. This pilot study demonstrates how KindSAR can assist educational staff in the teaching of geometric thinking and in promoting the metacognitive development by engaging children in interactive play activities. KindSAR is a pre-school educational application of a class of robots known as Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) that geometric thinking can be developed in preschoolers.

  • Exploring the educational potential of robotics in schools: A systematic review (Benitti, 2012)

Summary: This article contains a systematic review of literature on performance of (mostly) educational robots in classrooms. It concludes that robots often have a positive impact on students’ learning of new concepts, especially in the STEM area. It also notes that the research on educational robot effectiveness is still quite limited.

  • Storytelling robot helps children learn language. (Lu, 2019)

Summary: The article is about a robot called Tega. It is cute, fluffy and appears to boost language skills in young children. Tega read picture books to 67 children aged from 4 to 6 years in weekly one-on-one meetings lasting an hour. During the sessions, it asked questions to gauge the listener’s opinion and comprehension, quizzing them on a word’s meaning or getting them to draw conclusions about a character. All the children who played with Tega the robot ended up with improved vocabularies.


Technology

  • Autonomous spherical mobile robot for child-development studies. (Michaud et al., 2005)

Summary: This article concerns the design of a robot aimed at children aged 12-24 months. It gives insight into factors that are important when designing a robot for young children: for example it should be robust and easy to understand. Another factor is showing intentionality. Children will be more engaged with objects when the objects seem to have a will, e.g. they can move independently.

  • Child’s Perception of Robot’s Emotions: Effects of Platform, Context and Experience (Cohen, Looije & Neerincx, 2014)

Summary: Two robots are compared: the NAO which cannot change its facial features but has a movable body and the iCat, which can change its facial features but does not have a body. The conclusion is that children correctly recognized emotions in both robots at a high rate. Therefore facial features are not required for robots to express emotions.

Possibilities of entertaining children

Five possibilities of entertaining toddler with the NAO robot are elaborated below:

  • Emotion recognition (Pelle)

Recognition of emotions is fundamental to healthy social relationships in life. From birth on people get in an constantly changing environment of emotional input from other humans, a process of recognition which is learned in the early stages of life. When children get into school, they get into contact with other children on an almost daily basis. They develop awareness of their own feelings and of emotion-eliciting events. When robots are introduced into early stages of school, they can have a major effect on the emotional development of children. With robots not (yet) being conscious or able to develop social contact in the way humans do, there could be a clash which introduces one of the most used arguments against robot deployment in schools. However, robots can be used to teach certain emotions, for example showing different facial expressions on a screen and let the children guess the emotion the robot is trying to imitate. The implementation of these robots has been researched and proved helpful with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Leo et al., 2016).

  • Physical

To stay healthy, it is important to be active and move enough during the day. Unfortunately overweight is becoming more prevalent, also among preschoolers. In the Netherlands in 2009, 8-18% of children aged 2-5 years old was overweight or obese (Sijtsma, 2013). Overweight in early childhood also affects the likelihood of obesity in later childhood and adulthood (Cardon, De Craemer, De Bourdeaudhuij & Verloigne, 2014). Therefore, stimulating physical activity in preschoolers would be a good use of the robot. This could be done by using a humanoid robot (like NAO) whose movements children can imitate. The robot could also engage the children with dance or an educational, physical game, like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. A downside of this robot implementation is that physical activity requires enough space to move which can be hard in a full class room.

  • Learning by Quizgame

Scenario: The teacher of a kindergarten class sees that one of her pupils has some troubles, maybe the student does not fit in the group, has trouble sharing or something else. The teacher decides to help the child and wants to speak to her in private, but the teacher knows that her other students need to be kept busy while she does that. So she sets up the robot to play a quiz game with the remaining children. This way the teacher can help solve the problem to the best extent while the other children are not affected.

The robot starts talking to the kids and begins with a little story that he lost some of his favorite objects and that he needs the students help with finding them. First he asks the children to find his blue ball next comes the red cube and after this comes the orange triangle. The children have to bring the objects to the robot and the robot scans if it’s the correct item. If it is the correct item the kid is thanked for his good job, but if it is the wrong item the robot still thanks the kid for his effort and explains why this is not the right object. After this the robot thanks the children and tells them he also lost his utensils and asks them if the kids can help him again.

Meanwhile the teacher is solving the problem of his student. Thanks to the robot he can focus on this uninterrupted and find a solution quickly. After 5-10 minutes the teacher has resolved the issue and lets the student join his peers. He lets the little game finish and continues his class.

Requirements: - Needs to be able to hold the children’s attention. - The robot must have an educating effect on the children. - Must have sensors to sense the objects brought to it. - Should work from 9 in the morning until 12:30 without charging, charging should be done in one hour. - The robot must be accepted by majority of the parents. - The robot should resemble a human.

Background: At a young age children learn by playing and mimicking (Comer R., Gould E., Furnham A. 2013.), because of this a quiz where the children have to locate and bring an object which name is given is a good idea. For example the question “Can you bring me the red block?” is given. To reduce the stress and workload of the kindergarten teacher an anthropomorphized robot is the best option. (Han J. 2010)

  • Storytelling

Entertainment:

The study shows that entertainment, sense-making and knowledge are closely related in storytelling activities for young children. Importantly, for the young listeners storytelling is closely linked to entertainment, enchantment and fun. The young children, including toddlers, attended to the teachers’ story performance by engaging in attentive listening, volunteering embodied affective stances, verbal repetitions, and pre-emptive moves (Cekaite, 2018). The NAO robot could be used to perform the storytelling and to entertain the toddlers (Fridin, 2014).

Performance:

Nao as an embodied interactive storyteller, can assist the kindergarten educational staff by telling the children prerecorded stories. Nao told the prerecorded story, while expressing appropriate emotions both bodily and vocally. While telling the story, it taught the children new concepts. First it asked the children if they knew some of the terms related to the story. Nao gave positive feedback for any answer volunteered by the children, and then explained what the terms mean. It then asked the children what sounds are made by the animals in the story, and produced the animal sounds for them to hear. Furthermore images were shown on a screen to make the story more obvious. It also incorporated singing during the procedure and introduced motor games (such as imitating the robot’s movements like animals in the stories). During the procedure Nao constantly moved in front of the children, turned its head, and changed the color of the light in its eyes, simulating a human-like shift of attention to different children (Fridin, 2014).

Learning:

Storytelling is essential for children’s development of language expression, logical thinking, imagination, and creativity (Wright,1995). It can be used to engage preschool children in constructive learning. Storytelling by a robot as described in the paper 'Storytelling by a kindergarten social assistive robot: A tool for constructive learning in preschool education' is called constructive learning (Fridin, 2014). It encourages learners to experience the content in different ways, using different senses. The robot is suitably programmed to provide this multisensory learning experience: it displays images on a screen, tells a story and discusses it with the children, and incorporates singing and motor activities in the process. An interactive robot served as a teacher assistant by telling prerecorded stories to small groups of children while incorporating song and motor activities in the process. The results show that the children enjoyed interacting with the robot and accepted its authority (Fridin, 2014).

Requirements:

- Keep the toddlers busy with the robot for 15-20 minutes.

- The toddlers should love to play or communicate with the robot.

- The robot should be meaningful for the toddlers, for example improving skills of creativity/ vocabulary/ drawing/ sound expressions and holding attention.

- The robot should work for at least 8 hours without charging.

- The robot should be accepted by 75-80% of the toddlers parents.

  • Touch

It has been proven that touch can be very important for the development of children. For example, more touch contributed to a faster growth of newborns (Rausch, 1981). Therefore, touching robots can also be beneficial for toddlers. A study suggested that touching and viewing the robots was just as effective in improving the relationship towards the robot (Vickers, Ohlsson, Lacy & Horsley, 2004). In the same paper, a test or game was made using the NAO robot. This game could be further elaborated on and used for toddlers as well. In this way, touch could be used to get the attention of toddlers.

Interviewing nursery school teachers

To decide what the teachers actually want we have set up an interview to get their opinion on the matter. When making the questions we made sure that the questions were not biased and wouldn’t give biased results. For this we used the book “Principles and Methods of Social Research” and Multiple psychology textbooks. We figured out that we should not ask leading questions and how to best formulate a question.

Purpose: Find out which scenario of robottechnology (Physical, Learning by quiz game, storytelling) is most useful according to a nursery teacher and which requirements the technology has to match to make sure it's succesful.

Questions:


- What are the main tasks of a nursery teacher?

- Which tasks of a nursery teacher could cause - in your opinion - a possible high workload?

- Many teachers experience stress from a high workload. Do you do to?

- Which, if any, problems do you encounter during your work as a nursery teacher?

- Do you use some computer or robot technologies? If yes, which and on which basis?

- We developed three scenarios for using robot technologies in a nursery classroom to occupy children and thus lower the workload: 1. Physical exercise 2. Learning by quiz game 3. Storytelling

- Which scenario would - in your opinion - increase the workload the most and why?

- Which scenario would - in your opinion - increase the workload the least and why?

- Which scenario would - in your opinion - occupy the children the best and why?

- Which scenario would - in your opinion - occupy the children the worst and why?

- Is there another scenario using robot technologies which would - in your opinion - be more successful in lowering the workload and occupying the children?

- What would - in your opinion - be the criteria for success for robot technolgy in a nursery classroom?


Bibliography

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