Abstract:

In early childhood education, in daycare, tablets and smartboards are sometimes part of daily activities. Both children and staff are quite accustomed to using them, for example, for educational documentation and various pedagogical applications. Occasionally, robots like the Bee-Bot type can be used in daycare to practice logical thinking and the basics of programming. However, embodied robots or humanoids, are rarely present in daycare. We know that introducing such as helpers and collaborators have both a didactic and social impact in the context of learning and being. Here we share first insights related to a planned introduction of social and educational humanoids in a daycare context.

The preliminary findings are part of a research where we deploy Swedish-speaking robots at a Finland-Swedish daycare center to study how a robot can be part of the activities in early childhood education. Our research is focused on child robot interaction and we investigate if the robots could have a role or task in the early child hood education.

The integration and use cases for the daycare have been created in close collaboration with early childhood educators from daycare as well as with experts from Arcada where early childhood professionals are trained. These use cases have been co-created by using service design tools. All in all, our multi-disciplinary research team worked together with the experts in the field for about one year. For the project, we acquired an additional robot (Qt) specifically designed to work in educational environments with children. From the beginning of the project, we have worked with high transparency and with clear ethical principles. This is crucial when working in sensitive environments.

In this article we report on the results from the co-creation with the field. Our work resulted in two interventions or use cases ready for deployment. Our approach turned out to be both successful and appreciated among all parts. The developed interventions were adjusted according the experiences and insights from the field.

Keywords:

Child robot interaction, early childhood education, service design, co-creation.