RoDy: Teaching to share in Pre-School Education with a robotic teddy

Abstract

Educational robots have steadily made inroads in early childhood education. They have been used both as a tool to teach basic programming concepts as well as broader concepts such as the colours, the numbers, reading and writing. In this document, we present RoDy, a robot designed to teach children how to share and respect each other's turns when answering the questions presented in the class' interactive whiteboard. We have undertaken an experiment with 34 children ranging from ages 3 to 5 in order to validate RoDy's usability and strengths, as well as its capacity to develop sharing skills in preschoolers.