Montessori-based Design of Long-term Child-Robot Interaction for Alphabet Learning

The transition of the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin, set to be fully implemented by 2031, poses unwanted challenges to early and continuous literacy development and acquisition of the new script. This creates a need to design innovative learning solutions to boost children's motivation in acquiring the new Kazakh Latin alphabet. The Montessori method has proven itself effective for young children to engage in self-directed and developmentally appropriate literacy acquisition. These core ideas have been carefully adopted to establish design principles for the robotic system that is adhering to the principles of the Montessori pedagogy. This paper proposes a robotic system named Moveable -l-pbi and details its interaction design life cycle from understanding users and establishing requirements to designing, and implementing robot behaviours and validating them with the Montessori practitioner. This process was iterative that involved several cycles of piloting the system with children of targeted age groups and redesigning the learning activities. With the aim to evaluate the proposed system and to find the most cognitively rewarding way of learning the alphabet, we conducted a mixed-subject design experiment with 60 Kazakh children aged 8-10 years old from a local public school where we compare the proposed Moveable -l-pbi robotic system with a baseline Montessori human teacher. The results demonstrate the potential of the robot as a Montessori teacher in providing foundational letter acquisition over multiple sessions. Implications for improving the interaction design and activities are discussed based on the findings.