étui: a computational toy for reflection upon learning - CiteSeerX

ÉTUI: A COMPUTATIONAL TOY FOR REFLECTION UPON LEARNING Josep Blat, Dai Griffiths, Claudia Torres Dpt de Tecnologia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, E-08003 Barcelona, Spain. {josep.blat, david.griffiths}@tecn.upf.es, http://www.iua.upf.es/{~jblat, ~dgriffit} ABSTRACT In this paper we report work in progress on éTui, a computational educational toy to facilitate reflection upon learning in children aged 4-8 years. It is based on a robotics kit, moves autonomously, and has an insect-like appearance. éTui’s behaviors are modified when it senses obstacles in the environment, which provides scaffolding for children of this age to reflect on perception, autonomy, and learning. This paradigm differs from traditional use of robotics in education, mostly derived from Logo and currently based on Mindstorms, Crickets, …, which follow (imperative) programmability or robots construction as the key learning aspect. The toy’s appearance aims at engaging children, without being gender-biased and deceptive with respect to behaviors, and has been developed through co-design with children (as reported in [1]). In this paper we describe the main traits of the toy, discuss the educational aspects of the toy, both the reflection upon learning goal and our educational paradigm, and describe the educational work performed with the children and the results. 1.

INTRODUCTION

Computational toys have been recently attracting a lot of interest both in terms of commercial potential and research. Tamagotchi, Furby and Aibo are well known commercial products; while Lego Mindstorms, which derives from a research project (the Programmable Brick [2]), and curlybot [3] are educationally oriented examples. Our educational goal is to support meta-cognition for children of very young age. Meta-cognition refers to the skills of being able to reflect on one's thinking and learning, and of being able to integrate and link new understandings with those previously held; and is understood to play a significant role in the promotion of effective learning and meta-cognitive thinking strategies. Previous work on meta-cognition has been done mostly with children in secondary school, and a little with older children in primary education. éTuis are based on autonomous robots, and as they move around, working towards achieving goals, their behaviors usually have to be modified in response to

Richard Millwood, Kris Popat, Weiya Wang Ultralab, Anglia Polytechnic University http://www.ultralab.ac.uk/etui

input from the sensors, which detect obstructions in the environment preventing immediate fulfillment of the goal. These reactions of the toys provide an opportunity for children to reflect on perception, autonomy and learning. Most robotics for education follows Papert’s work which he describes as "I began to see how children who had learned how to program a computer could use very concrete computer models to think about thinking and to learn about learning and in doing so, enhance their powers as psychologists and as epistemologists" ([4], p. 23), and where “program a computer” can be replaced by “build and program a robot”. This is an excellent approach but, for the very young age we deal with, we have considered that the interaction of children with autonomous robots and of those with the environment can be similarly empowering for thinking and learning about learning, and we describe below the educational activities that we have undertaken and their results. The autonomous movements of éTui are those of a wandering insect, moving in a maze and others described below, although it can also move following direct manipulations of the children. The éTui is designed to be engaging for children and we found that a pet like appearance was the most attractive. We also found, however, that the characterisation should not be too realistic as this leads to children attributing too much intelligence to the toy. This deceives, which is arguably unprofitable for longer term engagement in an educational context. While movement and technology attracts boys, this appearance, without resorting to “girly” stereotypes, appeals girls; and this type of avoidance of genderbias is also sought. A full detail of the co-design process undertaken with children which led to this design, and the methodology and general results are reported in [1]. In the rest of the paper, we start by describing the final éTui as an autonomous robot and the reasons behind the behaviors chosen. We discuss metacognition and our educational approach afterwards, followed by description of the educational activities with the children and discussion of the results obtained. Finally we compare this research with other current research, and draw some conclusions.

2. THE CURRENT AUTONOMOUS ROBOTBASED ÉTUI The moving robot is contained in a curtailed hemisphere, which acts as a shell and can stand alone. The shell has been clad with soft bright fabrics which make it warm and soft to the touch, and give it an insect-like or alien sheen. Different working versions of the prototype have been built and used with the children, and each has got its own individual appearance variations. Four light sensors have been mounted as long antennae, paired with LED emitters. Image 1 shows two of the designs. Four LEDs on the top of the toy indicate the state of the toy's operation in an action, and a 'Do it' button on the top of the toy is used for different purposes. On the chassis there are optical sensors to detect rotation of the wheels which enables the detection of where it has been pushed by children, for recording and later replaying. The design allows for a flexible sensor configuration according to the requirements of the action to be performed. For example, the antennae may be twisted downwards to sense light or dark areas on the floor enabling it to follow lines, or be confined to a maze designed with black tape on the floor. Alternatively, the antennae provide collision-detection for the toy as it navigates its "world", or allow it to be drawn towards a dark or light area, providing possibilities for the use of a torch or lamp as a beacon. A more detailed description of the hardware is available in [web2], with pictures and videos of the different models. The hardware of the toy has been designed and b uilt using an off-the-shelf robot kit, Descartes, which has been significantly modified, expanded and completely reconstructed to provide more memory and Functions

Devices

Movement

Two DC motors

Position sense

Two encoders

Sound output

One speaker

“Vision”

Four optical sensors

Indication lights

9 LEDs

Function switch ('Do it' button)

One button switch

functionality. The selection of the kit was decided balancing the need of quite a lot of functionalities supported in a way robust enough for its heavy use by the very young children, development speed and economic constraints. Other kits did not seem to support quite a few functionalities, or were not commercially available in a way to support quick testing by children.

Image 1: Two éTuis following a line A suite of software control programs has been developed, and these can all be downloaded to the toy at the same time, so that in terms of behavior the toys are effectively self-contained. This enables children or teachers to select between a range of behaviors without subsequent downloading. A software simulator was developed in an initial phase for prototyping and testing early ideas on behavior with children, and more details can be found at [web2]

Comments Separate control for bi-directional rotation. The angle of rotation of the motors can be detected, with a resolution of 2 degree. (Cannot detect the movement caused by wheel sliding.) Produce sound with two given frequencies and duration. Detect obstacles, contrast colors, darkness and brightness. Four can be used as light emitters for optical sensors. One has snore effect. All can be used as state indicators. It can be programmed for different functions at different stages in different actions.

Table 1. Features of éTui

In Table 1 we summarize the relationship of functionalities and devices of the robot, together with Behaviour

some comments. In Table 2 the different autonomous behaviors which are currently built-in are listed. Description

1 Wandering insect

In this action, the toy behaves like an insect. It moves randomly along a number of pre-defined tracks (e.g.. circles, '8' shapes, and straight lines) avoiding obstacles. If it detects a moving object in front of it, it will reverse away from the object. If this reversing action is continuously repeated more than 3 times, the éTui will turn and escape to a dark area, then stop there shivering. After a while, the éTui will recover from the frightened state and start to wander again.

2 Towards beacons

The éTui moves towards the brightest area in its surrounding. The nearest LED will be turned on to indicate the direction of the brightest spot in relation to éTui's current position. It will avoid obstacles during the movement. If one of the light sensors detects obstacles or flashes, the corresponding LED on the top will turn on or flash. The éTui will also beep when an obstacle is detected. If the readings of four light sensors are the same, éTui will start to perform a little happy dance with sound. In a very dark area, the éTui will stop the action until the brightness of the ambient light is increased. Beacons or torches are needed for this action.

3 Learn tracks

Pushing éTui rolling along a track, it will remember the track. Press the 'Do it' button, the éTui will move forward along the same track and repeat. If it detects an obstacle on the way, it will turn away to avoid it and then repeat the track.

4 Learn tunes

The éTui can be taught to play tunes. Flashing a torch aimed at an appropriate light sensor can enter notes and duration. Not es can be modified, inserted, deleted and played back continuously. If the éTui has played a tune twice or more, it will remember it permanently. Otherwise, it will forget the newly learnt notes once being sent back to 'Action selection' mode or switched off. If the newly entered note sequence is the same as a piece in the memory, it will play the relevant notes to indicate that it has already learnt something similar.

5 Play tunes

The éTui plays pre-stored tunes while dancing. It will avoid obstacles and try to find stalled motors. Sometimes, it could stop the play, look around. Then resume it again.

6 Follow line

For this action, the left, right and back sensors should be configured facing down to the ground. The éTui will be able to follow a black line drawn on a white background, while playing tunes. The width of the line should be greater than the distance between the two facing down light sensors in the front. When there is an obstacle on its way, it will turn around to find the line and follow it.

Table 2. éTui's behaviors These behaviors are related to the characterization of the toy (a strange insect), and have been invented to test them against a few questions related to the educational goals: Evidence of the behavior and likehood of inspiring ideas, Engagement of the

children, State change suggesting learning, Purposefulness, Suitable range of inputs or outputs such as sound, touch, visual and musical. Initial testing has begun by the most likely interesting behaviors in terms of the fulfillment of these criteria.

3. META-COGNITION, SCAFFOLDING, AND THE CONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACH

words, the product of the relationships established between these two sets of observations - results in coordinations”. Logo and robotics can help meta-cognition, and a lot of work has been done in Mathematics, [6] [*], and in reading comprehension [7]. This work has been done mostly with children in secondary school, and occasionally with older children in primary education. In [8] work with USA sixth grade children is described, and it is shown that they were able to engage in reflection. mediated through a "think book" given to each child, where they engaged in guided

It has been acknowledged that meta-cognitive skills play a significant role in the promotion of effective learning and meta-cognitive thinking strategies, so that these skills can and should be taught. Previous work by Piaget [5] underlined that in meta-cognitive reflection “...the aim is to establish what he observes about his own actions (cognizance) and regarding the objects (that is, the effects of these actions on them) and to find out how the conceptualization - in other

activities supporting their, mostly written, reflection. Our work is with rather younger children who are not so skilled at producing sophisticated written work, and éTui should provide the necessary scaffolding to facilitate meta-cognition without much writing. Vygotsky provides an important background: "The zone of proximal development defines those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state" [9], p.86. Thus, for all children as they grow there is a larger or smaller set of concepts, ideas and conversations which they are capable of handling, but which for one reason or another they are unable to tackle without external support. The goal of éTui, and the activities which go with it, is to provide a focus and context for learners and these provide support for children in exercising the abilities, which they acquire in the transition into the phase of concrete thinking. éTui is functioning as scaffolding, in the sense that Bruner used the word [10]. More specifically we aim to support children in reflection on matters which are often dealt with in a purely abstract manner if at all: perception, orientation, autonomy, learning. We encourage the children to consider on these aspects of t he toy, and then to reflect on themselves, and the differences between their own capabilities and those of the toy. In other words, we try to engage them in meta level reflection. Piaget (see [11] p.96) spent a lifetime describing children’s genetic epistemology, gaining insight into the cognitive stages through which children pass. There is much debate about what the canonical stages should be, but most authors agree that there is a shift at about 7 or 8 years between thinking which is largely intuitive towards a thinking which is logical, but which requires concrete referents - whatever the age is for any particular child, éTui is intended to support the transition. Most robotics for education work has its roots in the work of Seymour Papert, constructionism, which he describes as “built on the assumption that children will do best by finding (‘fishing’) for themselves the specific knowledge they need. Organized or informal education can help most by making sure they are supported morally, psychologically, materially, and intellectually in their efforts” [12] p. 139. The work which has been done following this approach has mostly involved providing children with construction kits which either enable them to put together the hardware of a robot, or to program it, or both. The idea is that the process of putting things together, and observing the results, will stimulate children’s learning. This approach has had considerable

success, supported by very high quality research. Its deserved success, however, has tended to draw attention away from other possible ways of using computational toys with children, particularly with younger children who may have difficulty engaging with the abstract thought processes required for working with construction kits. The éTui project, while sharing the objective of enhancing children’s powers as "psychologists and epistemologists" sets out to do this by means of autonomous robots which are endowed with simple goals and sensing capabilities. The toy has an active relationship with its environment, and its reaction to the environment when seeking to achieve its goal provides an opportunity for children to reflect on perception and learning. Children may construe these changes in response t o the environmen,t with goals and plans being actively modified, as the robot appearing to “learn” something. This in turn offers the children the opportunity to reflect on their own learning. This kind of reflection is described in Flavell’s pioneering work on meta-cognition [13] p.906, quoted in [14] which stresses the importance for cognition of the actions and interactions of "(a) meta-cognitive knowledge, (b) meta-cognitive experiences, (c) goals (or task), and (d) actions (or strategies)". The mediation provided by éTui’s autonomous behavior can be understood too in terms of Vygotsky's work, which stresses that analysis of processes is of greater significance than that of objects, and similarly, explanation greater than description. He also points out that linguistic discussion has to run in parallel with action for effective learning. Central to the use of robots to provide mediation is the idea that the robot provides a rich and stimulating object onto which children can project ideas and sensations and processes, and that this relationship provides fertile ground for reflection. Resnick et al [2] emphasize the importance of this mediation in terms of Papert's constructionism, for instance a child using body syntonic thinking in “the connection between the robot as a physical entity and how he would use his own body to solve the problem and leveraged this understanding to create the solution”. For our purposes the issue is not the ability to accurately imagine oneself to be a robot (with all the epistemological problems which that implies), but rather the way in which perceived parallels and contrasts between a robots capabilities and behavior and those of the observer offer opportunities for reflection. Supporting for our approach appears in a page note of [15] “people watching the robot found this (autonomous) behavior

to be "endearing", making the robot seem more lifelike,… This tendency to anthropomorphize robots is another reason they are getting so much attention in the entertainment arena”. All the more remarkable, this behavior was in fact a malfunction, but observers treated it as a sign that the robot was "trying" without success to solve a problem, and demonstrating perseverance in the face of difficulties. 4. EXPERIMENTING META-COGNITION WITH CHILDREN MEDIATED THROUGH ÉTUI For over two years we have worked together with three partner schools (in UK, Spain, Norway), with teachers, children and parents (also at home), where a "facilitator" plays an important role in promoting this kind of "experimental" work. Our population is meant to be as "significant" as possible in addressing multicultural and gender-free issues. Robert Graves school in Majorca is a multicultural school with a small group of children, predominantly girls; Hollytrees is a typical community school in the UK, balanced between genders and with some children with English as a second language; Birallee is a Norwegian, international school. The school work is carefully prepared with teachers in a way that results into activities, which are in themselves educationally meaningful. .The first set of extensive trials with the physical prototypes of éTui have taken place from September 2000 till February 2001, with 24 sessions, carried out in 17 visits to the participating schools. They were meant to provide answers to some basic questions: How do children in terms of attractiveness, extended engagement and comparable acceptance by both girls and boys, receive the design of éTui? What level and what kinds of philosophical reflection and curiosity about learning, autonomy and sensory perception does éTui stimulate when used in a classroom or home activity with other children, teacher, parent and facilitator involvement and intervention? We should be aware that as first trials the conclusions we get are relatively provisional, and more testing is needed. In order to get a more structured approach for the trials (although we encouraged chidren’s creativity!), Units of Practic e in Apple’s terminology [web3], were designed and used: Reflecting on Perception (using the wandering insect behavior); Reflecting on Autonomy (with the éTui in a maze); Reflecting on Learning and Design (using the possibility of teaching movements to the toy by children’s direct manipulation). Additionally a fourth UOP was developed and used with another English school to explore comparisons between radio-controlled,

programmable, autonomous toys (the éTui) and humans. It is worth noting that there is a fascination effect, to be discarded, and an increase of interest and reflection all along the trials (as they are educational; but this might put a question mark on some results too). The activities were videotaped by the teachers or assistants; during the activities the facilitator was discussing with the children their opinion abut the toy’s perception, related to general perception issues; after the sessions, written analysis was performed. A database with the sessions has been produced, and a detailed report can be found in [web1]. We describe here the main conclusions. First of all, we have confirmed some working hypotheses: our balanced gender approach seems to work; engagement seems to be achieved both in appearance and behaviours (for instance, children’s interest led them to construct homes for the éTui); the toy entices a lot of reflection on learning. The “interface” of the toy needs quick improvement in an essential aspect: éTui should “know” its being handled, providing it with an elementary context sensitivity widely expected by the children. The activities with the children are very creative and the toy truly provides interactivity (which we were not sure of achieving): they set out to try to impersonate the toy, they re-create the maze and world with their own objects, they obstruct it with their hands … The first contact with éTui is in itself a very interesting discovery activity. Although the simulated “teaching” behavior (3) was not working properly, and needs to become more robust for the children’s activity, it attracted an enormous interest from them. 5.

RELATED WORK

Computational toys are an active area, in terms of both research and commercial exploitation. We summarize or enhance our discussion of alternatives comparing our results with theirs. Tamagotchi and Furby achieved a huge success, with heavy emotional engagement. Some of the relevant factors seem to be narrative, portability, appearance, “teaching” interaction, and awareness, which we discuss in [1], including deceptive behavior. Our own work on these toys showed that the Tamagotchi sustained interest for longer, probably because of its genuine interactivity, despite the Furby's greater initial appeal. Sony’s Aibo is an expensive dog-like robot, with quite autonomo us behaviors, capable of “learning”, is more “intelligent” and realistic looking. The challenges perceived by its designers are the problems of learning, maturing, and autonomy of the

robot [16], which are formulated in terms of entertainment, where they see five main aspects: watching the movements of the robot, interacting with it, raising it, controlling it, and developing it. The challenges perceived are the problems of learning, maturing, and autonomy of the robot. Natural human interaction is seen as the environment in which users can interact with the robot without using special tools. We have described our positive experience towards achieving our educational goals through éTui. While we have started our robot at a lower level of autonomy and learning than Aibo, it seems enough for reaching our targets and is potentially much more available. The initial “computational educational toy” was Papert’s Logo, where the turtle’s direction and trajectory could be controlled by simple programs written by children. Derived robots began soon, with the Floor Turtle connected to a mainframe computer [3]; some autonomous ones such as Pixie and Roamer are still used in British schools. The Programmable Brick (which has evolved into Lego Mindstorms) is also programmed in languages which are dialects of Logo [3]. In these toys the paradigm described above is the key learning aspect. Curlybot [3] claims to follow this line, although it is intended for much younger children, and so it is programmed by direct physical manipulation, based on the toy being able to record the movements children give it, and being able to reproduce them exactly when switched to the “play” mode. This is one of the behaviors éTui is capable of and we share the same target age group. The work reported in [3] is in progress, and only a first unstructured study with children exists. Some of the interaction questions described, such as conditional behavior, gesture and narrative, synchronization, music, trading, different personalities, are present also in this paper, with a lot more experimental support being gathered. Our educational goal is quite different (meta-cognition versus geometry) and the wide variety of behaviors of éTui offer a lot more possibilities and provide with a potentially richer educational experimental background. ActiMates [17] are active toys, which are pretend playmates, and their appearance is that of a plush doll for children’s engagement. The approach taken is also based on scaffolding, specifically supporting social interaction for children’s mental growth but is quite different from ours. The pet-like toys' primary response is speech. In stand-alone mode, it speaks reacting to physical interactions with children in a playmate way. When connected to a computer or to a video, the behavior changes to a coach or to a co-

viewer. Further developments have gone deeper into emotional aspects (praise and encouragement, laughter and humor, warmth and affection [17]). While we share the view that engagement and motivation play a decisive role for the learning of children of this age, our toy is quite different in content and goals from ActiMates. Digital Manipulatives [18] are augmented blocks, beads, balls, badges, ... augmented versions of objects currently familiar in kindergartens. Although they rely on the programming by children too, we see that them being part of families of objects communicating with each other, promotes a change in approach hinted by assertions in the paper such as “one must develop a model of the audience” when the paper discusses about Cricket or “there are multiple approaches for describing behaviors” when discussing Beads. These are strong indicators, in our view, that the programming might become of a different kind and likely to take into account the approach based on the autonomy of the robots we have presented in this paper. 6.

CONCLUSIONS

Computational toys are bound to represent a fascinating and expanding line of research in the near future, because of the relative novelty of the topic, and its relevance in children's learning lives. In this paper we have reported work on a computational toy, éTui, which presents a few novelties, such as using this type of devices for promoting meta-cognition education for very young children; promoting a paradigm of education through children interacting with and reflecting about robotics autonomous behaviors. In order to achieve these goals we have seen how engagement and other important criteria are needed to configure both these behaviors and the appearance of the toy, describing our solutions. We have compared the educational paradigms currently used to ours, and our background. We have also seen the level of engagement and success in the educational goals achieved in structured experiences with the children. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS éTui has been funded by the European Commission under the ESPRIT Experimental School Environments research programme. We thank the whole teams at Ultralab, UPF, Apple and the schools (especially the children) for their work and enthusiasm.

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