What Yale’s Socially Assistive Robots and StudioWeb have in Common
I was reading an article on Yale University’s research with socially assistive robotics, that help to teach kids. The main points I got out of the article:
- Robots learn and adapt to individual student need.
- Students are motivated when the learning process is turned into a game. A little competition is very motivating for many students. Otherwise known as gamification.
- When students work one-on-one with a robot, they are not afraid to answer questions, since all the students are busy working with their own robots.
- The robots look like fun toys.
This is interesting to me, because the StudioWeb app and curriculum, has been developed with an awareness of the above lessons.
StudioWeb’s experience reflects Yale’s:
StudioWeb’s software shares similar traits (if you will) with Yale’s socially assistive robots. StudioWeb is a gamified app where students learn to code, as they unlock levels, earn badges and score points. Students work on their own computers, at their own pace, and so they don’t have to worry about social pressures.
Understanding the importance of the emotional component of teaching, each of our courses are represented by fun and cool animals: two frogs, a sheep, a spider and a python. Each animal also becomes the course badge students can earn. Finally, we add to the learning process fun, with the gaming aspect, and good old fashioned humour.
… Students come away smiling and giggling as they learn to code.
StudioWeb does not replace teachers … but we help!
From the article:
“You may have a public school where there are 25 to 30 kids in a classroom and the amount of time that the teacher can spend one-on-one with each child is relatively limited,” said Scassellati in an interview with R&D Magazine.
Socially assistive robots free up teachers time, so they can concentrate their efforts where it might be needed – say students who made need special attention. This is a far better approach than trying to teach a classroom as they did in Plato’s time.
In a nutshell: the core lessons need not be taught over and over again by the teacher. That’s where assistive technology (robots and apps) come into play.
StudioWeb provides the same benefit. We’ve designed our curriculum and app, in such a way that it is nearly impossible for students to get stuck on a coding lesson, whether it be theory or actual coding. As such, students happily work through the video based lessons, without having to ask the teacher questions that have been asked countless times.
Rather than using an Ai, we’ve been able to refine our lessons over the last several years, eliminating the common questions, by addressing them in the lessons themselves.
… Good old fashioned teaching my father taught me, combined with data from a few hundred thousand students and your courses start to get really good!