An educational environment based on stuffed toy robots, mobile apps, and expert systems to provide support in the early development of children

Abstract

According to the UNESCO, the sensitive periods in early brain development occur during the first seven years of children lives. The most relevant areas related to childhood development are the numbers, vision, emotional control, peer social skills, hearing, habitual ways of responding, symbols, and language. For this important reason, in this paper, we present an educational environment aimed at providing a set of tools to contribute to early stimulation of children assisting to low and middle-income schools. Our system relies on mobile apps and stuffed toy robots able to interact with children and other robots to teach several concepts related to early development in both, individual intervention sessions, and group sessions. This tool incorporates a rule-based reasoning expert system to select intervention strategies better. To validate our proposal, we worked with 47 children and a team of experts in the early education area.