Interaction Design And Implementation Of Children Educational Robot On Cultivating Social And Emotional Competence

Since the 1990s,Human-computer interaction domain has raised much more attention to the thinking of human.Human-engaged computing is a new concept which aims to synergize innate human capacities and technological capacities to enable us to realize our full potentials and help solve complex real-world problems.Currently,the education pattern of children has switched,from single dimension of cognitive learning to diversified intelligence development,and the cultivation of Social and emotional competence has received more attention globally.However,there are still some problems regarding implantation of Social and emotional learning on a daily base,such as lack of educational resources;Also,today’s Social and emotional learning mainly focuses on classroom activities and ignores the apart of after-school practice including parent-child interaction.Hence,we designed a companion robot for children to improve Social and emotional competence based on the theory of Human-engaged computing.First of all,we design the robot characters suitable for children aged 6-12,based on a large amount of user research.Then,we incorporate Social and emotional learning psychology theory to design the interaction for educational robot.The interaction mainly consists of two parts:visual interaction and dialogue interaction.beside,in order to reach the Human-engaged computing,we also combine the multi-modal affective computing and cognitive computing modules in the cloud.On one hand,the robot helps children enhance their Social and emotional competence.On the other hand,with the support of multi-modal affective computing,the robot can improve the feasibility of interaction.With the increase of the interaction times,the children and the robot can reach a better synergism and achieve the goal of HEC.We recruited children aged 6-12 years to test the feasibility of the robot.According to the result of the experiment,the robot has a positive impact on the improvement of children’s negative emotions and ability to recognize their emotions;Therefore,we can conclude that by multi-modal interacting with the educational robot,children can improve their Social and emotional competence.