Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have launched an eight week trial to test how well preschool children can learn language skills from robots.
The experiment is monitoring rates at which children learn and remember new vocabulary from a selection of storytelling robots, at a local Boston kindergarten.
Supplemented by a tablet computer to illustrate the stories, the robots – dubbed “DragonBots”, adapt their stories each week, coordinating their pace with the progress of the child. The research team, led by graduate student Jacqueline Kory and Dr Cynthia Brezeal, then logs and tracks the data to determine any patterns.
