A Study of Utilizing Communication Robots for Teaching Preschoolers a Good Manner

Abstract

In recent years, opportunities for communication between preschool children and others are decreasing. The reason is that the birth rate in Japan is declining and in many families, both parents have jobs. Therefore, the parents spend less time with their children at home. In order to raise a child as an independent person, it is important to educate children adequately while the child’s ego is germinating. However, in recent years, the burden of kindergarten teachers has increased, and there is concern that the environment for educating preschool children becomes worse. The purpose of this research is to investigate the possibility for reducing the burden on kindergarten teachers by training young children with robots that they are interested in.

1 Introduction

Families who cannot make time for domestic activities because the husband and wife both work have increased in Japan. Therefore, education in kindergarten for preschool children is more important than education in the home. In addition, in this globally competitive, modern society, more parents make their children take lessons from a young age to try to raise the odds that their child will grow up in excellent conditions. The important thing in children’s growth is not only to increase their academic ability but also to nurture their personality and humanity. In order to make our children grow up as independent people, it is important for us to provide sufficient education to children in the period when their egos are developing.

However, kindergarten teachers are decreasing in Japan because they’re working long hours for low wages. Therefore, securing kindergarten teachers becomes difficult, and it isn’t possible to add more kindergarten classes. The number of children waiting to find space in a kindergarten class increases.

Robots are beginning to be used in kindergarten children’s attendance management, but the possibility of the utilization in education is unknown. However, the performance of current robots is progressing and robots can communicate nearly as well as man. Robots are expected to resolve the human labor shortage and improve educational effects [1]. Study has been conducted on robots for kindergarten education [2,3,4]. When utilization of robots in kindergarten education can give a kindergarten student an education with fewer teachers, we can expect a shorter waiting time for children going to kindergarten.

As a preliminary study, we investigated the kindergarten child’s reactions and the thoughts of a kindergarten teacher when we installed a robot in the classroom.

2 Methods

We investigated the kindergarten child’s reaction and the thoughts of a kindergarten teacher when we installed a robot in the classroom. A robot did the greeting which is oneway to investigate the possibility of using a robot in kindergarten education. We also investigated whether a kindergarten child greeted a robot, when a robot greeted a kindergarten child.

2.1 Experimental Equipment

We used MEEBO, which is a communication robot (UNIFA Corporation). MEEBO has been developed as the robot that watches a kindergarten child. We used MEEBO because we’ll be able to utilize MEEBO in an educational setting. MEEBO has sound and facial recognition functions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

Communication robot - MEEBO

Moreover, a smart-phone-type remote control is attached to MEEBO. This remote control is freetel priori2 of the SIM free smart phone. When MEEBO and a remote control are under the same Wifi environment, it’s possible to operate MEEBO by remote control. As for the operating method, first of all, we connect the remote control to optional Wifi. Next, a QR code is generated on the remote control when connected to Wifi. Finally, MEEBO can read the QR code using its QR reading function, and we can connect it to the same Wifi network as the remote control. It’s possible to operate MEEBO by remote control in this way. The operations that can be performed by remote control are greetings, recreational activities and taking pictures. When we press a button, MEEBO moves (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2.

Remote controller of MEEBO

2.2 Experiment Conditions

We investigated at the Harumidai kindergarten in Sakai City, Osaka. We experimented with 79 kindergarten children from 2 to 6 years old. Moreover, we put MEEBO at the position that was slightly lower than the height of children so that MEEBO could easily recognize the faces of the children. A kindergarten teacher stayed by the children during the experiment. We performed experiments for each child.

2.3 Program Creation

Teachers of Harumidai kindergarten are teaching “GOSENGOREI” as a greeting. The students are supposed to bow after the greeting (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3.

Bow after the greeting

We created a program that has MEEBO bow after saying certain words. We created the program using “VstoneMagic”, the programming software of MEEBO. We can create the program to work like a flow chart. It’s possible to create the program by adding order blocks of face recognition, facial flattery and sound (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4.

VstoneMagic

We visited Harumidai kindergarten before creating the program. We wanted to see how teachers taught greetings followed by bows. The program was created based on that. The flow of the program for MEEBO performing a bow after saying certain words is indicated on Fig. 5.

Fig. 5.

The flow of the program

The program is preserved with java programming language inside. It’s possible to program the program created by VstoneMagic with java programming language. We corrected the program a little on eclipse. Moreover, we set it so that MEEBO could perform the program by remote control.

2.4 Beginning Questionnaire

We gave a questionnaire to 15 kindergarten teachers of Harumidai kindergarten (male 1, female 14) before doing this investigation. The questions of the beginning questionnaire are indicated below (Table 1).

Table 1. Beginning questionnaire

2.5 Kindergarten Children’s Reaction and Concluding Questionnaire

We took a video during the experiment to see whether kindergarten children would greet a robot when a robot greeted them. We gave a questionnaire to 15 kindergarten teachers of Harumidai kindergarten (male 1, female 14) after conducting this investigation. The questions of the concluding questionnaire are indicated below (Table 2).

Table 2. Concluding questionnaire

3 Results

3.1 Beginning Questionnaire

The results of question 1 and question 2 of the beginning questionnaire are indicated in Figs. 6 and 7.

Fig. 6.

Results of question 1

Fig. 7.

Results of question 2

Kindergarten teachers with less than 5 years of experience accounted for 53.3% of all teachers at Harumidai kindergarten. Teachers with less than 10 years of experience but more than 5 accounted for 26.7% of all teachers. Teachers with more than 10 years of experience accounted for 20.0% of all teachers.

Moreover, teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 accounted for 53.3% of the whole. Teachers who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 accounted for 26.7% of the whole. Teachers who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 accounted for 53.3% of the whole.

Figure 8, shows the percentage of respondents in question 2 based on length of service.

Fig. 8.

Results of question 2 based on length of service

Teachers who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 had less than 5 years of experience. Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 were teachers with more than 10 years of experience. Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 accounted for 50.0% of teachers who had less than 10 years but more than 5 years of experience. Moreover, teachers who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 accounted for 50.0% of teachers who had less than 10 years of experience but more than 5 years.

As for the reasons that teachers answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2, answers included “Because I think personal use of robots is increasing,” and “kindergarten children seemed to have an interest in learning from a robot.” As for the reason that teachers answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2, 25% of those teachers said, “The position of the teacher is diminished.” The other 75% answered, “It’s better to have human contact because there is no feeling in a robot.” As for the reason that teachers answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2, 25.0% of teachers answered “I can’t tell unless I try to see it,” while 62.5% answered “I think it’s good, but I think it’s difficult for the robot.”

3.2 Kindergarten Children’s Reaction

Kindergarten children were very interested in MEEBO. There were a lot of kindergarten children who aggressively tried to speak to MEEBO. On the other hand, there were some kindergarten children suffering a little in the presence of MEEBO. The chart about the kindergarten children’s reaction when MEEBO performed a greeting followed by a bow is indicated in Fig. 9. Kindergarten children were classified into three groups: (1) The kindergarten child who didn’t greet, (2) The kindergarten child who greeted without bowing(the kindergarten child who did the greeting with words but didn’t bow), (3) The kindergarten child who did a greeting in words and a bow.

Fig. 9.

Children’s reactions

Kindergarten children in (1) accounted for 27.9% of the whole of Harumidai kindergarten students. Kindergarten children of (2) accounted for 43.0% of the whole. Kindergarten children of (3) accounted for 29.1% of the whole.

3.3 Concluding Questionnaire

The results of question 2 of the concluding questionnaire are indicated in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10.

Results of question 2

Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 accounted for 46.7% of the whole. Teachers who answered “B. I didn’t think it was good” to question 2 accounted for 20.0% of the whole. Teachers who answered “A. I thought it was good” to question 2 accounted for 33.3% of the whole.

The percentage of respondents in question 2 based on length of service is shown in Fig. 11.

Fig. 11.

Results of question 2 based on length of service

Teachers who answered “A. I thought it was good” accounted for 50.0% of teachers with less than 5 years of experience and 33.3% of teachers with more than 10 years of experience. Teachers who answered “B. I didn’t think it was good” accounted for 33.3% of teachers with more than 10 years of experience, 12.5% of teachers with less than 5 years and 25.0% of teachers with less than 10 years but more than 5 years of experience. Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” accounted for 37.5% of teachers with less than 5 years of experience, 75.0% of teachers with less than 10 years but more than 5 years, and 33.3% of teachers with more than 10 years.

As for the reason that teachers answered “A. I thought it was good” to question 2, teachers who answered, “Children can learn a greeting happily because children were very interested in the robot” accounted for 60.0%, and teachers who answered, “I think that it will be a good stimulus for children because there are few opportunities to interact with a robot” accounted for 40.0%. As for the reason that teachers answered “B. I didn’t think it was good”, teachers who answered, “There is no feeling in a robot” accounted for 33.3%, and teachers who answered, “There are few variations of conversation with a robot” accounted for 66.7%. As for the reason that teachers answered “C. Neither A nor B”, teachers who answered, “It’s effective to use a robot, but I think child’s concentration doesn’t last because the conversation of the robot was slow” accounted for 85.7%, and teachers who answered, “I think it’s good that a child plays with a robot, but I think it’s better for education to be about human interaction” accounted for 14.3%.

There were two opinions in question 4. The first opinion is that teachers want a robot to recognize the face and the name of each child and to call the name of the child. The second opinion is that they think it’s better to change the size of the robot to something a little bigger.

3.4 Comparison of Beginning and Concluding Questionnaires

We compared the beginning and concluding questionnaires. First, the chart that shows comparisons of question 2 is indicated in Fig. 12.

Fig. 12.

Comparison of question 2

Figure 12 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 increased by 13.3%. The percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 decreased by 6.7%. Moreover, the percentage of respondents who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 decreased by 6.6%.

Figures 13, 14 and 15 show comparisons of question 2 based on length of service.

Fig. 13.

Kindergarten teachers with less than 5 years of experience

Fig. 14.

Kindergarten teachers with more than 5 years of experience but less than 10 years

Fig. 15.

Kindergarten teachers with more than 10 years of experience

Figure 13 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 increased by 12.5%. The percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 decreased by 12.5%.

Figure 14 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 decreased by 25.0%. Moreover, the percentage of respondents who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 increased by 25.0%.

Figure 15 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 decreased by 66.7%. Moreover, the number of respondents of C is equal to the number of respondents of A and also equal to the number of respondents of B.

4 Discussion

As shown in Fig. 8, teachers who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 of the beginning questionnaire were teachers with less than 5 years of experience. Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 were teachers with more than 10 years of experience. Teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” to question 2 accounted for 50.0% of teachers who had less than 10 years but more than 5 years of experience. Moreover, teachers who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 accounted for 50.0% of teachers who had less than 10 years but more than 5 years of experience. Teachers with less than 5 years of experience are interested in utilizing a robot for kindergarten education. On the other hand, teachers with more than 5 years of experience seem to be resistant to the introduction of robots because they are proud of the work they have done for many years.

Looking at the results comparing the beginning and concluding questionnaires, the percentage of respondents who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 of the concluding questionnaire increased by 13.3%, and the percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” decreased by 6.7%. Moreover, Fig. 13 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “A. I think it’s good” to question 2 increased by 12.5%, and the percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 decreased by 12.5%. Figure 14 shows the percentage of respondents who answered “B. I don’t think it’s good” to question 2 decreased by 25.0%. Therefore, the number of teachers who think it’s good to use a robot for kindergarten education increased. Moreover, the number of teachers who don’t think it’s good to use a robot for kindergarten education decreased. This result was obtained because children were interested in the robot and were enjoying time with the robot. On the other hand, conversation of was slow because facial recognitive functions didn’t operate well for kindergarten children with differences in height. There was also the problem that MEEBO has few variations of conversation. We’re planning to conquer the problems we identified in this investigation and improve the robot. That way, there is a possibility that teachers who think it’s good to use a robot for kindergarten education will increase.

Some kindergarten children were very interested in MEEBO and there were a lot of kindergarten children who aggressively try to speak to MEEBO. On the other hand, some kindergarten children were scared of MEEBO. There were many older children and year - round children in the former group. There was many young children in the latter. We found four reasons that some kindergarten children were suffering. The first reason is because they are not familiar with kindergarten yet. The second reason is because they felt tension and fear in conversing with a strange object. The third reason is because they were tense in the different circumstances. The fourth reason is because they have felt uneasy because the conversation of the robot was slow. Facial recognitive functions didn’t function well for kindergarten children with different heights, and execution of the program where MEEBO performs a bow after saying certain words was behind schedule. Therefore, MEEBO’s conversation slowed down. It’s necessary to improve and wide the scope of facial recognition.

As shown in Fig. 9, kindergarten children of (2) accounted for 43.0% of the whole. MEEBO can only move its neck when it bows because its lower back doesn’t bend. Therefore, MEEBO didn’t seem to be doing a bow and the kindergarten children didn’t do the verbal greeting and bow. It’s necessary to get the robot to bend.

5 Summary

• The percentage of teachers who answered “C. Neither A nor B” in question 2 was the largest in both the beginning and concluding questionnaires.

• We found out that most children are very interested in the robot.

• When MEEBO performed a verbal greeting followed by a bow, the number of the kindergarten children who could perform a verbal greeting and a bow was small. However, 72.1% of Harumidai kindergarten children returned a greeting to MEEBO.

• Children could learn happily by using a robot. On the other hand, conversation was slow because facial recognition functions didn’t operate well for kindergarten children with different heights. Moreover, there was also a problem that MEEBO has few variations of conversation.

• There were two opinions in question 4. The first opinion is that teachers want a robot to recognize the face and name of each child and to call out the name of the child. The second opinion is that the teachers think it’s better to increase the size of the robot.

6 Conclusion

We found out that kindergarten children tended to have an interest in the robot, and that kindergarten teachers are expecting to utilize robots but also have a feeling of uneasiness.

When the problems of the speed of the conversation, facial recognition and the individual recognition of names and faces by MEEBO are solved, there will be a possibility for kindergarten education using MEEBO.