Robots Are Helping Students With ASD Learn About STEM
The classroom can sometimes be a poor learning environment for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) who sometimes find that communication with others is uncomfortable or difficult.
These kids may be overwhelmed by face-to-face interaction and struggle to learn from teachers and social workers. As a result, they can fall behind in classroom topics like math and science, even with therapeutic intervention.
Researchers and education experts are looking to new tools that may be a better fit for children with autism. Educational robots — which are becoming more common in classrooms — have shown promise in teaching STEM topics.
Researchers Experiment With Robot Teachers
A few different companies and research groups have experimented with educational robots for students with ASD. Like other teaching tools, these bots are designed to teach children STEM concepts, like basic physics, as well as soft skills, like emotional calming strategies.
One example is Kiwi, a robot created by a research team from the University of Southern California. This bot can teach students with ASD math and social skills. For example, it provides children with ASD personalized lessons in the form of space-themed math games. As it teaches, Kiwi can use information — like head pose and voice pitch — to gauge the level of engagement or change the difficulty of the task at hand.
Through interacting with Kiwi, 92 percent of children involved in the team’s study were able to improve their math and social skills. If successful in a larger-scale trial, these robots could become an option for teaching children with autism and providing therapeutic interventions in-home. Regular, one-on-one therapy for kids with ASD can be prohibitively expensive for many families. Robot teachers may be able to help supplement less frequent therapy sessions.
Why Robots Work Well for Children With ASD
There are a few reasons why researchers and robotics companies are interested in using robots to teach children with ASD.
Robots can provide personalized, in-home lessons. Children with autism can get overwhelmed by noisy environments, like crowded classrooms. One-on-one classes in controlled, less chaotic spaces could make it easier for kids with ASD to focus.
Adaptive lessons provided by robots can also help tailor education to each child. Because the symptoms of autism, along with the severity, can vary significantly from person to person, one-size-fits-all approaches aren’t likely to be as effective as specific ones. Robots can take advantage of unique teaching methods that may be especially effective in children with ASD.
Another teaching robot is Milo, an expressive humanoid bot developed by the company RoboKind. The robot teaches an autism curriculum developed by Michelle McFarlin, a certified clinical speech-language pathologist and autism expert. As Milo speaks, vocabulary icons appear on the screen in sync with the robot’s speech, providing a clear visual aid for students who may struggle with auditory processing.
McFarlin told Robotics Business Review that robots are a good fit for students with ASD because they behave in the same way, every time, and “repetition and consistency is really important to the way that we know that children with autism learn.” Children with ASD are also naturally prone to an interest in technology — another big plus, according to McFarlin.
How Robots May Change the Future of Education
As robots become cheaper and more widely available, they are playing a more significant role in the education of all children. The unique features these robots can provide may be especially helpful for students with ASD.
While some of these experimental bots, like Kiwi, aren’t available to the public yet, others — like RoboKind’s Milo — are already in use. In the near future, more options may be available.
