New learning environment for enhancing storytelling activities of children with intellectual disabilities/autism using a personal robot in the classroom

In this paper we describe the results of two-year's practical research in a classroom of children with intellectual disabilities and/or autism. We conducted one 40-minute lesson per week for two years with three autistic children and one with Down's syndrome. The children were studying kokugo (Japanese language). A prototype personal robot from NEC corp., PaPeRo, was utilized as a major part of the learning environment to enhance the children's storytelling activities and help them to produce text in their e-mail conversations. We found that the length of stories produced by the children continually increased and the participants began to tell more grammatically complex stories. We also found when comparing teachers' check lists on the children's behavior that the degree of behavior problems had decreased significantly. Further investigations must be needed to clarify the effectiveness of using robots in the classroom for children with intellectual disability or autism. However, the results suggested that the new learning environment has a promising role in this field. Applicable Topic: Interfaces to facilitate storytelling by users in text, audio, pictures, and video media