Abstract
Lately, some high-end robots have been proposed for facilitating interaction with children with ASD with promising results. Nevertheless, most educational environments lack these robots, among other reasons, for cost and complexity considerations. In this work, a simple Bee-Bot has been used as a support tool for children with ASD who played a memory game about emotions. The main objective of the experiment was to study whether using this robot while playing the game resulted in improvements in the children verbal communication. Also, this work explored if incorporating the Bee-Bot robot to the game resulted in additional improvements in the level of child involvement in the activity.
This study has been conducted with children who had no previous experience with Bee-Bots. We qualitatively evaluated the children abilities during the memory game and quantitatively the children verbal and non-verbal communication during the memory game with and without Bee-Bot. The results revealed that all children showed a clear improvement in the use of verbal communication when playing with Bee-Bot, a result that allows us to encourage schools and kindergartens with educational robots to put them to use with children with ASD. Our study indicates also that even using a relatively primitive robotic toy, such as Bee-Bot, produces comparable results to using a more complex humanoid robot. On the other hand, although the use of robots manages capturing the attention of children with ASD we cannot not confirm that these robots helped children pay more attention to the memory game. This experiment will be expanded in the future to obtain results that are more comprehensive.
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Project “TU TEE - Tallinn University as a promoter of intelligent lifestyle” (nr 2014-2020.4.01.16-0033) under activity A5 in the Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Educational Innovation.
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Leoste, J., Tammemäe, T., Eskla, G., San Martín López, J., Pastor, L., Blasco, E.P. (2022). Bee-Bot Educational Robot as a Means of Developing Social Skills Among Children with Autism-Spectrum Disorders. In: Merdan, M., Lepuschitz, W., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1359. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82544-7_2
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