CAN ROBOTS SUPPORT SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

CAN ROBOTS SUPPORT SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

DR SARIKA KEWALRAMANI, DR IOANNA PALAIOLOGOU, PROFESSOR

JOHN SIRAJ-BLATCHFORD, DR MARIA DARDANOU

Sara (9-year-old) and her sister (6-year-old, Kiana) engage in a play session where a codable Cat Bot (robotic toy) is a ‘ partner ’ in the play scene. Without directions, the parent provides the children free space [free-flow play] and place to interact with the robot. This enables the child to become an involved agent in joint play with another child. Sara dramatises the Cat Bot as being hungry and asks Kiana to pat the cat. Kiana pats the cat and feeds it milk, while Sara codes the Cat to make sounds and actions. Kiana notices the robot’ s actions as a modelling of expressions of positive feelings (i.e., wagging tail when being fed milk; meowing when happy). These feelings demonstrated by the Cat Bot provide a stimulus for the child to respond (e.g., let’ s feed the hungry cat some milk) and verbalise their own feelings and emotions during play. The Cat Bot acts as a potential partner to stimulate the child’ s social and emotional skills through triggering empathic responses and fostering opportunities for the children to cocreate collaborative empathetic play scenarios.

This vignette introduces a scenario of how through robot play, children such as Kiana (who is selective mute and from English as an additional language background) can engage in social interactions that enable them to potentially acquire skills for social and emotional adjustments and development. In this article, we showcase the use of robotic toys, applicable in early childhood to primary settings as a playbased and inquiry approach to develop children ’ s social and emotional competencies, including those children with diverse needs and abilities.

We know that children ’ s social and emotional development is critical to their wellbeing, relationships with others and long-term prosperity (Allen et al., 2021; Frydenberg et al., 2012). Research has highlighted time and again that all new activities offered to children must be meaningful, and this requires activities to have a relationship to what the child can already do (their schemes) and/or knows (their schemas) (Siraj-Blatchford & Brock, 2019a). It is crucial to support children ’ s emergent learning in free-play, even if children are playing and tinkering with advanced technologies such as robots. When we are able to build upon what a child ‘ can do ’ , we

are providing emotional scaffolding to their emergent learning (Siraj-Blatchford & Brock, 2019b). For a child with additional diverse needs (e.g., language or communication delays), ability to make friendships can be a skill that needs explicit scaffolding, which can happen within a free-play scenario such as the vignette above.

Over a three-year period, research in Australia, England, Scotland, and Norway has developed compelling evidence for the need to harness the unmet potential of robotics technologies as a significant opportunity to build children ’ s social and emotional competencies (Arnott et al., 2020; Kewalramani et al., 2020, 2021, Palaiologou et al., 2021). The evidence was evaluated using qualitative methods and found robotic toys as a play-based inquiry approach could be used to develop children ’ s social interaction with their peers, carers, educators and families in everyday natural learning environments. Through playful explorations with the robots, children can be provided with opportunities to collaborate with their peers/siblings (e.g., via role play or by exercising choice and control when coding the robot to perform tasks) – important skills for social-emotional learning. The robots ’ preprogrammed functions (e.g., represent anthropomorphised characters or real/imaginary animals), together with the robots codable features allow the child to exercise choice and control. The features are haptic (digital touch screen interface), audio-visual, tactile, movement, and thus offer ‘free-play flow ’ type affordances (in contrast to traditional 2D/3D non-interactive toys).

In the case of above vignette of Sara and Kiana, the children co-created a scenario with the robot as a central character in their story and narrative.

Kiana notices the robot’ s actions as modelling feelings (wagging tail when being fed milk) and words (meows when happy).

These feelings demonstrated by the Cat Bot then allows for the child to verbalise their own feelings and emotions during play (let’ s feed the hungry cat some milk, let’ s feed it some cake).

The robot acts as a potential partner to drive the child's emotional thought process, triggering empathy as seen in the playful dialogues. The child co-creates a ‘ selfgenerated’ empathetic situation where she wants to continue feeding the Cat Bot new items and sing songs. The sibling joins in as a coding playmate to facilitate the child’ s social-emotional actions and feelings to feed to cat, which is being imagined to be hungry.

The below is another example from a nursery context in England.

George (3years and 8months) and Theo (4years and 2months) in the nursery are using LEGO BOOST robot that is coded via a tablet . The teacher is present as this is a new addition to the portfolio of the toys in the nursery. The teacher explains to the children how the IoToy works and then steps back to allow them to explore it. Both children start following the instructions and after a while, Theo brings some small wooden brigs and explains to George that they can build a bridge and they can code the robot to demolish the bridge. They both build the bridge and then try to code the robot. Their first two attempts were not successful in order for the robot to demolish the bridge. Then they ask their teacher for help. With the help of the teacher, they try again and this was very successful. They tried couple of times. Then they used Lego pieces and made a house. They tried to see how they can demolish the house and this time coded the robot successfully on their one. During the coding process they were instructing each other “ reflecting ” on what they had learnt from the teacher.

The play with robotics toys in these examples identifies the importance of peers and the robot both as play partners, where children start developing meta-cognitive skills (Autognosia = ways of knowing /understanding their everyday world and how to form social relationships through self-regulation of their emotions). Children learn to do this by drawing upon their knowledge and experience and responding to the stimulus offered by the robot.

The below pedagogical steps adapted from the SchemaPlay model (Siraj-Blatchford & Brock, 2019b) provides an example of the processes of learning that are involved in children ’ s free-flow play with robots. Early childhood and primary teachers and parents can use these steps to plan for children ’ s free-flow play and inquiry with robotic toys.

Pedagogical steps used to facilitate children ’ s free-flow play with robots

Table 1

List of robotics toys used in our research

Concluding thoughts

When we fully appreciate the dynamics of children ’ s free-flow play with robots, and also appreciate the importance of observing both the schemes (children ’ s ways of knowing and being) and schemas (children ’ s unique contexts and abilities) displayed in children ’ s robotics play, and effectively scaffold and build upon these in supporting their holistic social-emotional development and emergent learning of complex cognitive skills, only then we as early childhood/primary educational professionals can start to truly provide the child-centred learning while using technologies such as robots (SirajBlatchford, & Brock, 2019a). Robotics play provides an educational culture to enable the child to always feel in agency, to develop their self-esteem, value, and a recognition of themselves as active learners and problem-solvers in their own enacted stories. The child learns through observing,

modelling and imitating of behaviours and appropriate scaffolding by the teachers/parents. The robot when placed within the child’ s learning environment provides a ‘ schema ’ i.e. a context to generate empathy-based situations and problems keeping the robot as their central character at the heart of children ’ s self-generated inquiry. The interactions and communication between the child and the robot as well as the haptic and codable manipulation of the robot to perform certain tasks acts as a natural stimulus to provide the child with a novel and unique schema and free-flow play experience. This experience serves as an opportunity and a source of motivation for the child to connect with others in the play routine. After all, it is inevitable that children will enjoy playing with robots that can listen and react to their commands! However, for the robotics play to flow in early childhood and primary educational settings, we have to effectively integrate robots as ‘toys and/or tools ’ that adds as an educational value and supports children ’ s play and inquiry (which is the most effective context for learning). In SchemaPlay, we refer to ‘ seeding the play learning environment’ (in response to the schemes and behaviours that children are applying in their play).

References

- Allen, K. A., Kern, M., McInerney, D., Rozec, C., & Slavich, G. (2021). Belonging: A Review of Conceptual Issues, an Integrative Framework, and Directions for Future Research. Australian Journal of Psychology. - Frydenberg, E., Deans, J., & O’Brien, K. A. (2012). Developing Children ’ s Coping in the Early Years: Strategies for dealing with stress, change and anxiety. Bloomsbury Academic. - Kewalramani, S. (2019, September 13). Why preschool is the best time to spark an interest in STEM. Monash Education Teachspace. https://www.monash.edu/education/teachspace/ar ticles/why-preschool-is-the-best-time-to-spark-aninterest-in-stem - Kewalramani, S., Palaiologou, I., & Dardanou, M. (2020). Children ’ s engineering design thinking processes: The magic of the ROBOTS and the power of BLOCKS (electronics). [Open access]. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. https://doi.org/10.29333/ ejmste/113247 - Kewalramani, S., Palaiologou, I., Arnott, L., & Dardanou, M. (2020). The integration of the Internet of Toys in early childhood education: A platform for multi-layered interactions. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 28 (2), 163-166, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2020. 1735738 - Kewalramani, S., Ellis, K., & Kidman, S. (2020, June 4). How to build a more inclusive STEM program in early childhood using robotics and conductive blocks. Monash Teachspace. https://www.monash.edu/education/teachspace/ar ticles/how-to-build-a-more-inclusive-stemprogram-in-early-childhood-using-robotics-andconductive-blocks - Palaiologou, I., Kewalramani, S., & Dardanou, M. (2021). Make-believe play with the The Internet of Toys: A case for multimodal playscapes. British Journal of Educational Technology. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13110 - Siraj-Blatchford, J., and Brock, L. (2019a) Grasping the confidence to achieve their potential, Early Years Educator, Vol. 21, No. 4. - Siraj-Blatchford, J., and Brock, L. (2019b) How to scaffold learning through free-flow play, Early Years Educator, Vol. 21, No. 3.

Sarika is an Early Childhood/Primary STEM lecturer and ‘ prac-academic ’ at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Sarika's research expertise resides in conceptualising kindergarten and primary teachers' understanding of the nexus between creative STEM-based play by integrating technologies (robotics) in their teaching practices and educational programs in ways that promote children's learning and development. Sarika has recently designed an evidence-based Monash short course (available online) for 'Enabling STEMbased Play in Early Childhood (0-8 years old)' . This course is suitable for educators who are seeking to upscale and upskill their knowledge and understandings to develop children ’ s (including children with diverse needs) problem solving, creativity, and inquiry skills through STEM-based play. For more information visit the link here, and visit her LinkedIn to see glimpses of her teaching and research activities. Dr. Ioanna Palaiologou CPsychol AFBPsS has worked as a university academic in the UK for the last 20 years. She is a Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society with specialism on child development, learning theories and assessment and was appointed as Associate Fellow of BPS in 2015. In 2017 EECERA annual conference she was awarded best published paper for 2016 in the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal for her paper ‘Children under five and digital technologies: implications for early years pedagogy ’ . Her most popular books are Child Observation: A guide for students of early childhood (4th Ed) and Early Years Foundation Stage: theory and Practice (4th Ed) both published by SAGE.

Professor John Siraj-Blatchford Dr Maria Dardanou

Professor John Siraj-Blatchford is a founding Director of SchemaPlay; a Community Interest Company providing training, research and consultancy in early childhood care and education. SchemaPlay aims to contribute towards an improvement in the learning outcomes of disadvantaged young children, and a narrowing of the gaps in educational outcomes that are associated with socioeconomic, cultural and gender difference. Maria Dardanou is an associate professor of pedagogy in early childhood teacher education at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her research expertise is in digital technology in the early years, with a special focus on the internet of toys and touchscreen technology and related pedagogical perspectives. She is the coconvenor of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association ’ s special interest group on 'Digital Childhoods, STEM and Multimodality' .