Robot teacher reads student thoughts

A robot teacher is able to monitor the concentration of students and attract the attention of children promising to stop the state of drowsiness.

Tests show that this robot can increase the amount of knowledge students learn from the lesson.

The problem with online courses is that it is often impossible to know whether students are focused and involved in the lesson. Unlike robots, human teachers have many skills to keep the whole class focused on changing tones or using gestures. Bilge Mutlu and Dan Szafir of the University of Wisconsin-Madison want to find out if a robot can use the same skills to improve the amount of knowledge a student can collect. They programmed a Wakamaru humanoid robot, told the students a story, then checked how much they remembered.

Attendance levels are monitored using an EEG sensor to monitor the FP1 region of the brain where management of learning and concentration are concerned. When there is a significant decrease in some brain signals that indicate a decrease in student attention, the system sends a signal to the robot to trigger a hint.

Wakamaru Robot

First, the robot teacher tells a short story about the animals that form the lunar calendar to get a basic EEG reading. Next, the robot tells a longer story (10 minutes) based on a Japanese folktale that students may not have heard before. As the story goes, robots will raise their voices or use hand gestures to engage the student's attention if the EEG level is low. The other two groups were tested but the robot did not signal, or disperse the sign randomly during storytelling. Then, students were asked about the herd to distract them before being asked a series of Japanese fairy tales.

As a result, students are signaled by the robots as their concentration decreases to recall the story better than the other two groups. "The idea of a gradual recovery of students' attention in this way will have many important applications in the field of education ," said Andrew Ng, director of the Stanford University School of Artificial Intelligence. (US).