Robots have undoubtedly played a big role in a wide range of sectors, but the jury is surely still out on the impact they can make in domains that require a very human touch. Education fits that bill, and so it’s interesting to read a recently published paper in Science Robotics, in which the deployment of the technology is assessed.
The paper suggests that social robots are having a positive impact in very narrow fields, such as teaching vocabulary, but are nowhere near sophisticated enough to even begin to replace teachers on a larger scale. They are still largely hampered by limitations in areas such as speech recognition and poor abilities in terms of social interaction.
“In the broadest sense, social robots have the potential to become part of the educational infrastructure just like paper, white boards, and computer tablets. But a social robot has the potential to support and challenge students in ways unavailable in current resource-limited educational environments. Robots can free up precious time for teachers, allowing the teacher to focus on what people still do best – provide a comprehensive, empathic, and rewarding educational experience,” the authors say.
Robots in the classroom
The paper saw over 100 articles on the use of robots in the classroom examined, looking specifically at both the outcomes achieved and the limitations identified in use cases to date. Whilst there have been some promising early results, technical constraints in areas such as speech recognition continue to hamper deployment.
The authors also believe that introducing social robots into the curriculum could pose a number of logistical challenges and even risks that the children becoming over-dependent upon the robots rather than figuring things out for themselves.
“Next to the practical considerations of introducing robots in education, there are also ethical issues. How far do we want the education of our children to be delegated to machines? Overall, learners are positive about their experiences, but parents and teaching staff adopt a more cautious attitude,” they conclude.
It’s clearly early days for the application of robotics in a classroom setting, and so analyses like this will be crucial to help ensure that the evidence of those early applications reaches as wide a audience as possible. This will allow for future iterations to build upon what has gone before and begin to overcome the various limitations identified in early studies.
