According to the New York Times, robots will soon be a highly useful and easily available tool for young students, in addition to teachers. The robots that are being used in these educational settings are designed to be social creatures; they respond to a human moving and even talking to it, as if it's a real person.
In experiments here in America, and actual classrooms in other countries like South Korea, robots have proven to be an effective helping hand for human teachers. They have been most effective with young and mentally handicapped children. At the University of Hertfordshire, for example, researchers have built a child-sized humanoid robot named Kaspar to encourage social interaction skills in children with autism.
An eight-year old student named Sam told the New York Times, “I just love robots, and I know this is therapy, but I don’t know -- I think it’s just fun.”
Sam is in therapy for Asperger Syndrome, a type of autism. It takes a special kind of person to help autistic children, one with endless patience and knowledge. A human's greatest flaw is that we're all, well, human. We make mistakes, get frustrated, get bored, even with children. Robots don't.
Robots are infinitely patient, highly informed instructors perfect for mentally handicapped children.
And because of a robot's interactive nature, tests at the University of California, San Diego, and MIT show that young children are much more likely to retain information learned from a robot, rather than a stationary form like note cards.
Or a stationary blog like this one! Who knows, you might have learned a lot more from this blog if a robot were standing next to you to read it aloud. And that is either a very cool idea, or extremely creepy.
Credit: Image courtesy of University of Hertfordshire
Tags: Communication, Robotics, Robots
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