Hello! Ever feel like you’re stuck on a paper and you don’t know what questions to ask yourself to help with your reflection and analysis to think deeper about the topic? Or ever felt like you don’t quite understand the instructions of an assignment? The Robotic Peer is an application that talks to you and helps you work out your problems. Please visit my site below for a demo.
The Robotic Peer
Hi Rika, you captured a promising trend in AI’s influence on education. Robotic peers could hold great potential for education, in terms of providing academic support. Have you also considered making your application emotionally intelligent with Artificial Intelligence? My concerns are basically about social-emotional development. Making your design emotionally intelligent, may tap into kids’ emotional, social, and cognitive development in the near future. I am envisioning a bigger picture with AI technologies in education, so to speak, more than just being an academic companion. But I also recognize several concerns about giving robots these responsibilities, including worries about privacy and about what unintended impact the robotic tutor may have on kids’ development. The future for robotic peer/tutor seems promising, as I discovered some research that suggests robots can enhance learning by helping preschoolers identify and resolve conflicts, also teach children with special needs to successfully interact with peers, moreover, support children with their math, grammar, and language skills. As a matter of fact, AI technologies have already been making contributions to special learners. This short video captures exactly the future you are envisioning for special learners, https://www.nbcnews.com/video/the-robot-changing-school-for-students-with-disabilities-819143235773. Lastly, on a personal note, I’ve heard too many stories when tutoring kids drive their parents crazy, so this might be a valuable investment for their kids learning.
Hi Zheng,
You raise an important concern. Socio-emotional development through an application is difficult. For example, I considered an A3 about micro-chip from one of our peers, but I worry that there are health risks to implant something in the brain as it is such a tricky organ of The body. A possible invention I can think of is having a robot as a peer that plays and interacts with children. Social conflicts will also arise in which the robot will be the expert other who scaffolds social conflict resolution. As socio-eMotional development cannot occur without the social aspect, I feel like having an AI robot who can analyze different conflicts and determine possible resolutions may be less invasive. I do see the extreme value in technology support socio-emotional development, but as a Kindergarten teacher and experience ECE, I also understand the complexity of social conflicts. So having someone to safely practice these social conflicts would be my preferred technology. But my eyes are still on seeing where technology implants go even though it is a discomfort of mine.
Hi Rika! Excellent job. I giggled at your opening line in your post as I answered out loud: “ALL THE TIME.” I am always looking for tips and tricks of how to take my writing further. I have also felt confused about instructions during this program and due to not physically being in classes with the ease of leaning over and asking a colleague, the robotic app would come in handy! I appreciate the aspect of the app creating guiding questions in order to get the kids to figure things out rather than just expose the answer. Well done, Rika!
Hi Megan:
I’m with you! This semester I think I struggle with understanding instructions quite a bit so I thought an application to ask guiding questions would have worked in my Cavour to producing better work!
Hi Rika. Thanks for showing the robotic peer! The Robotic peer demos were done really well and I can see how the interface would be engaging for students to interact with. I wonder what place your app would have in the classroom. For instance, when would be the best time to use the robotic peer as opposed to working together in groups? I can see this doing wonders online. If this also enables peer-to-peer collaboration too, I wonder if theoretically it would be best to talk to peers before using the robotic peer or vice versa? For students that are less comfortable or on a much different zone of proximal development, I can see this peer being very helpful.
Hi Jackson:
I agree that human interactions are valuable and should be put first. I’m my classroom, during work periods, I encourage students to talk to each other to get a better understanding of the content or to develop understanding of different perspectives. For example, we might individually solve a math question, but after times up, I create a gallery walk where I put students with similar problem solving techniques together and have students walk around and try to figure out how they came to that solution. They are able to talk about the ways in which different students solved the same question. Similarly, I hope that the application can be used in the classroom where students first try before asking for help. Then do some peer to peer editing or questioning and finally go to the application for even more refining. At home, students may not have a peer or parent to check in with, so this becomes their step two after trying on their own.
How would you recommend the use of this application of it was offered in your classroom?
Hello Rika. I enjoyed reading about the Robotic Peer app and think this idea is fantastic. You went into a lot of detail to show that this forecast goes beyond current assistive applications. I appreciate the effort of creating the animations and think you’re probably the only one who did some prototyping. Scaffolding is an essential part of learning, especially in the early stages of life, and this can be missing today in online learning environments or large classes. I think that one of the goals of scaffolding is to ultimately help students develop self-directed learning skills and independence. It would be interesting if the app could employ strategies that support the development of these skills, so the tool is both supportive and transformational.
Hi Eduardo:
Throughout the creation process, I had questioned myself, “Would repeated practice of breaking down questions and instructions help students develop independence and learn how to break down questions? Or would it create reliance?” When I think back to my students who ask me questions, I have found that eventually, the same questions would decrease over time. Thus, I felt that the application, over time, would seem repetitive in the sense that students would become familiar with the strategies and develop independence in breaking down questions and instructions. I did have both my large class and online class in mind when thinking about this application. I was constantly using my breaks or lunch to repeat the same question in different ways to guide students into reaching the answer without doing the work for them. This was important to me, as a conversation I had with the prof, he reminded me if an app did the work for the student, can we really call it mobile learning? So this was also a big question I kept in mind while creating this. I really wanted to make LEARNING HAPPEN.
Thank you for your feedback!
What an amazing idea, Rika! The idea of the app acting like a homework facilitator or a guide to support learners and direct them in the right direction is amazing! And I believe this app works for all ages, I wish I had an app similar to this to facilitate and guide me through the prompts in order to achieve every single goal in our projects. We all know the importance of multimodality and personalization in achieving effective learning, however, I never thought about instructions for assignments being multimodal and personalized, and I believe that this is an effective method to facilitate that aspect of learning and assessment. The best features are motivating learners through game-based traits and the “break” when the learner is having difficulties.
Hi Maria:
Thank you for your detailed feedback and the different parts of my application.
Similar to what you said, this application also stems from my own struggles, especially recently. Im unsure if it is due to age, difference in teaching and instruction, summer break or my recent concussion, but I had difficulty understanding instructions to assignments this semester. I had asked academic friends to read the instructions and tell me what they understood from it. This was obviously a fail, as they didn’t quite grasp some of the jargon. So when coming up with this app, apart from my son’s personal and my professional experience that gave me the rationale to this project, my own personal academic experience also impacted some of the features i included, such as breaking down instructions or paraphrasing in different ways. I wanted to maintain a reason for students to use the application, hence I included the game-based features and points for trying, as not enough reinforcement is given students for their efforts sometimes.
Thank you for your feedback!
I agree, Rika! I also struggled a bit in understanding specific goals in the instructions, I could’ve found great pleasure in a visual representation of the instructions, besides examples from peers. Basically, I would definitely invest in your application! 🙂
Rika,
Firstly, I really liked how you were vulnerable in sharing your story with your son and your concerns with his speech development, it really shows that you are passionate about this topic and that you have a personal connection in why you feel this is so important. Your story also shows how you were able to understand your sons development because you are educated on this topic but many parents do not have that luxury or understanding. I also like how you explained how the AI in the app is designed to ask guiding and probing questions similar to the way you, or other educators would in best teaching practices. This also reminded me of some checklists as visualizations that I give to students who are completing essays, the goal is to get them to remember those important details. I think this app works like that but in a much more interactive way utilizing those important technologies which I think can really benefit a lot of learners.
Hi Sonia!
You’re absolutely right. As much as teachers want to be able to scaffold and breakdown instructions and questions for all students, sometimes we don’t have the time to make it to all students. And like you said, not all parents have the luxury or knowledge to support students. As a child, i know i didn’t get any help with my homework which caused me a lot of frustration and spent many after-school hours getting help from my teachers. However, not all teachers are willing to use their personal time that way. You’re also right that this applications goal is to teach students how to pick up important details from instructions and questions independently by showing them how to do it in different homework or schoolwork context.
Thank you for paying attention to my story. This was very valuable to the creation of my application!
Hi Rika – I was slightly skeptical at first, (as it gave me flashbacks of that Microsoft Word paper clip guy), but seeing the video prototypes actually got me very interested in the app. Could you possibly elaborate more on how the AI is connected to the homework assignments? I imagine that a K-8 student would be working on a paper-based or online assignment (e.g. pointillism art), while the Robotic Peer is on a phone. How does the student submit the assignment into the application? Then, for example, if I asked the AI a question like “does it look good?” does the AI review the art work via the phone’s camera?
Hi Aaron:
What is the Microsoft paper clip guy? I feel like I too am getting flashbacks but I not in enough detail to know what he did.
I did use the videos knowing my audience would be for young children and different learners who may benefit from more interaction with the application, as well as the ability to customize their talking avatar.
To answer your questions:
1. Could you possibly elaborate more on how the AI is connected to the homework assignments?
Through interaction with the student and utilizing different ways to paraphrase or breakdown questions or instructions, AI would pick up what strategy works best for the students. In this way, the application would use less and less tries to breakdown the instructions before it reaches a strategy that works for the student. This in turn, decreases frustration and decreases the need for it to get to the calming down and taking a break part of the application. It is important that the application does not tailor the instructions immediately, but gives the students an opportunity to try and build their understanding first, then using the application to check if their understanding was headed in the right direction.
2. How does the student submit the assignment into the application?
In the student application, there will a dropbox under the particular assignment for students to submit their assignment. The application would them scan the doc to make sure that the questions given are answered and display comments and feedback to the student. As the application is built on appreciating the learning process, students can resubmit as many times. However, it is up to the teacher’s discretion or agreed number of submissions that decide upon which document the teacher would use for grades.