CoWriting Kazakh: Transitioning to a New Latin Script using Social Robots

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic towards Latin alphabet raises challenges to teach the whole population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system that aims to implement an autonomous behavior of a social robot that would assist children in learning a new script. Considering the fact that the current generation of primary school children have to be fluent in both Kazakh scripts, this exploratory study aims to investigate which learning approach provides better effect. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid robot NAO how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin vs Cyrillic. We hypothesize that it is more effective when a child mentally converts the word to Latin in comparison to having the robot perform conversion itself. The findings reject this hypothesis, but further research is needed as it is suggested that the way the pre-test was performed might have caused the obtained results.

CoWriting Kazakh: Learning a New Script with a Robot

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet raises challenges to training an entire population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system, an extension of the existing CoWriter system, aiming to implement an autonomous social robot that would assist children in transition from the old Cyrillic alphabet to a new Latin alphabet. With the aim to investigate which learning strategy yields better learning gains, we conducted an experiment with 67 children, aged 8-11 years old, who interacted with a robot in a CoWriting Kazakh learning scenario. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid NAO robot how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin or Cyrillic. We hypothesized that a scenario in which the child is asked to mentally convert the word to Latin would be more effective than having the robot perform conversion itself. Results show that the CoWriter was successfully applied to this new script-switching task. The findings also suggest interesting gender differences in the preferred method of learning with the robot.

Association for Computing Machinery2020

Learning (Good Handwriting In Greek) By Teaching (A Humanoid Robot)

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Thanasis Hadzilacos

We report on a follow-up study of the Co-Writer project at EPFL [1]; we confirm their findings, extend the applicability to another language with a different alphabet (Greek) and go into an in-depth qualitative study of the child-robot relationship. The core idea of "learning by teaching" is that the student learns by undertaking to teach what they are supposed to learn which motivates them into ownership of the process. Although a highly effective method [2], there are serious practical obstacles in scaling learning by teaching to larger numbers or extending it to younger learners and to certain skills such as handwriting. This is where we enlist the assistance of a humanoid robot to help a young learner with her handwriting by assuming the role of the cacographer pupil who asks help from its human friend. The robot pretends writing mistakes similar to the child's own; the child recognizes the errors as such even when she would refuse to acknowledge them in her own writing, and makes an extra effort for better writing as the robot's instructor; the robot improves its writing; the child goes through another round of amelioration; and, hopefully, gets in the habit of better writing. In order to extend the original study for the Greek language and alphabet we first needed to collect data from beginner writers, children of 6-9 years. The nine-month study for collecting and evaluating handwriting samples from primary school students in Cyprus in order to examine and describe cacography for the Greek alphabet used a questionnaire, an evaluation sheet for the letter formation and copies of students' notebooks. It involved four primary schools in Limassol, Cyprus and a total of 68 students and 11 teachers. We were thus able to obtain a consensus on what constitutes poor letter writing in Greek. All writing samples were evaluated by teachers and were classified based on Chandra et al. [3] taxonomy. The qualitative research involved three case studies of children who held two sessions each with the humanoid programmable robot NAO. We video recorded the child-robot interactions and assessed their progress in handwriting. In all three cases, albeit not in the same degree, we saw that (a) the child-robot interaction quickly improved; the increasing number of correct remarks from all children in only two meetings shows the comfort that they gained with lab environment and the robot itself and (b) the correctness of children remarks and their comments about letters shows their ability to distinguish the correct from the wrong letters and to justify their answers. Both conclusions confirm the findings of the Co-Writer project [4].

IATED-INT ASSOC TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT2020

A Comparison of Social Robot to Tablet and Teacher in a New Script Learning Context

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg

This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical objectives about language learning. Teachers are not necessarily trained to teach the new alphabet, and this could result in a challenge for children with learning difficulties. Prior research studies in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have proposed the use of a robot to teach handwriting to children (Hood et al., 2015; Lemaignan et al., 2016). Drawing on the Kazakhstani case, our study takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together smart solutions from robotics, computer vision areas, and educational frameworks, language, and cognitive studies that will benefit diverse groups of stakeholders. In this study, a human-robot interaction application is designed to help primary school children learn both a newly-adopted script and also its handwriting system. The setup involved an experiment with 62 children between the ages of 7-9 years old, across three conditions: a robot and a tablet, a tablet only, and a teacher. Based on the paradigm-learning by teaching-the study showed that children improved their knowledge of the Latin script by interacting with a robot. Findings reported that children gained similar knowledge of a new script in all three conditions without gender effect. In addition, children's likeability ratings and positive mood change scores demonstrate significant benefits favoring the robot over a traditional teacher and tablet only approaches.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2020

Learning (Good Handwriting In Greek) By Teaching (A Humanoid Robot)

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Thanasis Hadzilacos

IATED-INT ASSOC TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT2020