Co-designing a Social Robot for Newcomer Children's Cultural and Language Learning
It addresses the challenge of limited resources in literacy programs for newcomer children, but is incremental as it focuses on expert insights rather than implementation or testing.
This research tackled the problem of newcomer children facing barriers in language and cultural learning by co-designing a social robot named Maple with program tutors and coordinators, resulting in preliminary design guidelines for integrating such robots into classrooms.
Newcomer children face barriers in acquiring the host country's language and literacy programs are often constrained by limited staffing, mixed-proficiency cohorts, and short contact time. While Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) show promise in education, their use in these socio-emotionally sensitive settings remains underexplored. This research presents a co-design study with program tutors and coordinators, to explore the design space for a social robot, Maple. We contribute (1) a domain summary outlining four recurring challenges, (2) a discussion on cultural orientation and community belonging with robots, (3) an expert-grounded discussion of the perceived role of an SAR in cultural and language learning, and (4) preliminary design guidelines for integrating an SAR into a classroom. These expert-grounded insights lay the foundation for iterative design and evaluation with newcomer children and their families.