Social Robots for Teaching Arabic Morphological Awareness in Elementary Schools: A Long-Term In-The-Wild Study

Social robots are slowly being introduced into the educational system. One of their primary advantages is the application of novel pedagogies that are not available to every teacher, in a social and engaging way. However, using social robots “in the wild”, namely, in schools, operated by the teachers to engage an entire classroom, while maintaining small groups interactions is still a challenge. An exploratory study is presented in which an affordable, scalable social robot platform is used in an elementary school setting for long-term pedagogical activities. The robot taught morphological awareness through root extraction in the Arabic language, using a novel engaging pedagogical program. A schoolteacher prepared the activities of the robot and operated three robotic platforms concurrently for a duration of three months in school, to enable small group activities that addressed an entire class. Our results show that these long-term, in-the-wild activities achieved highly significant and large learning gains on a large population of 121 participants from first and second grades. We discuss future steps that will enable bringing social robots into the formal school system, by making them affordable, easy to operate and working with small groups.