"You've got a friend in me": Co-Designing a Peer Social Robot for Young Newcomers' Language and Cultural Learning
This addresses the challenge of providing scalable, personalized learning support for young newcomers in community settings, though it is incremental as it builds on existing social robot and co-design approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of limited personalized support for young newcomer children in Canadian community literacy programs by co-designing Maple, a peer-like social robot that serves as a practice partner in tutor-mediated sessions, resulting in a prototype with story-based activities and multi-modal scaffolding to enhance language and cultural learning.
Community literacy programs supporting young newcomer children in Canada face limited staffing and scarce one-to-one time, which constrains personalized English and cultural learning support. This paper reports on a co-design study with United for Literacy tutors that informed Maple, a table-top, peer-like Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) designed as a practice partner within tutor-mediated sessions. From shadowing and co-design interviews, we derived newcomer-specific requirements and added them in an integrated prototype that uses short story-based activities, multi-modal scaffolding (speech, facial feedback, gesture), and embedded quizzes that support attention while producing tutor-actionable formative signals. We contribute system design implications for tutor-in-the-loop SARs supporting language socialization in community settings and outline directions for child-centered evaluation in authentic programs.