Robot Learning Companion Offers Custom-tailored Tutoring

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Over the eight weeks, the personalization continued to increase. Compared with a control group that received only the mirroring reaction, students with the personalized response were more engaged by the activity, the researchers found.

In addition to tracking long-term impacts of the personalization, they also studied immediate changes that a response from Tega elicited from the student. From these before-and-after responses, they learned that some reactions, like a yawn or a sad face, had the effect of lowering the engagement or happiness of the student -- something they had suspected but that had never been studied.

"We know that learning from peers is an important way that children learn not only skills and knowledge, but also attitudes and approaches to learning such as curiosity and resilience to challenge," says Breazeal, associate professor of Media Arts and director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. "What is so fascinating is that children appear to interact with Tega as a peer-like companion in a way that opens up new opportunities to develop next-generation learning technologies that not only address the cognitive aspects of learning, like learning vocabulary, but the social and affective aspects of learning as well."

The experiment served as a proof of concept for the idea of personalized educational assistive robots and also for the feasibility of using such robots in a real classroom. The system, which is almost entirely wireless and easy to set up and operate behind a divider in an active classroom, caused very little disruption and was thoroughly embraced by the student participants and by teachers.

"It was amazing to see," Gordon reports. "After a while the students started hugging it, touching it, making the expression it was making and playing independently with almost no intervention or encouragement."

Though the duration of the experiment was comprehensive, the study showed the personalization process continued to progress even through the eight weeks, suggesting more time would be needed to arrive at an optimal interaction style.

The researchers plan to improve upon and test the system in a variety of settings, including with students with learning disabilities, for whom one-on-one interaction and assistance is particularly critical and hard to come by.

"A child who is more curious is able to persevere through frustration, can learn with others and will be a more successful lifelong learner," Breazeal says. "The development of next-generation learning technologies that can support the cognitive, social and emotive aspects of learning in a highly personalized way is thrilling."

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