Robot-Supported Inclusion and Learning: A Case Study on the KUBO Robot in Early Childhood Education

Background
The presence of educational robots in preschool and early primary school settings is getting stronger and has shown to have powerful playful qualities and to support learning. Research within socially assistive robotics in education suggests embodied robotic technology may facilitate social engagement and support inclusion, however little research has been conducted on whether the act of programming social robots may play an important part in discovering and designing for diversity in play and learning. This paper presents findings from a case study on the educational robot KUBO in Denmark and proposes a participatory and practice-based approach to the design of robot-supported learning aimed at the transition between preschool and primary school. The purpose is to support and empower children’s essential life skills including imagination, collaboration and communication skills and to provide pathways capable of detecting and including a diversity of children’s needs and skills in a more advanced way than currently offered by traditional educational technology.
Method used
Kubo is a mobile robot developed by Danish startup company Kubo Robot, designed to support learning for children in early primary school in various subjects such as coding, language, and music through a tangible coding language; TagTiles.
In the case study, teachers and pedagogic professionals co-developed robot-supported learning designs with KUBO and tested these in three different scenarios; math teaching in 2nd grade, play-based learning in kindergarten as well as a ’transition’ experiment in which 2nd grade students were teaching young children (age 5-6) how to code using KUBO. Data included four instances of participatory observations, interviews with the teacher and pedagogic professionals as well as in-situ interviews with children.
Key results
The case study provides valuable insights into inclusive practices applied when implementing robot-supported learning designs (e.g. using a story-telling approach to facilitate computational thinking and understanding of coding concepts or applying peer-to-peer learning to empower children with learning disabilities), however, new potential inclusive practices also emerged from experimenting with the robots. For instance, a child’s individual experimentation with programming in ways very different from his peers (e.g. applying engineering methods) turned out to reveal different skills but also needs, which may support more diverse approaches not only to the technology, but to learning in general.