• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.532-540
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to explore young children's perception of IrobiQ, the teacher assistive robot. Participants of this study were fifty 5 year olds attending 3 kindergarten centers who had experienced the robot for at least 2 years. The study was conducted based on the "the hypothesis of speech register". Each child was read a storybook by a researcher and asked to choose which one is more suitable to human speech tones and accents among a robot, a friend, and a toy. The findings of this study were that the children perceived a robot as a hybrid compound entity, not as a complete human though they perceived it closer to a human than an artificial thing. They were likely to use cognitive distinctions which is unique to human being, as the criteria to verify their answers. These results would suggest that the traditional binary ontological category(animate vs. inanimate) is reconsidered to include an hybrid entity.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.455-466
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to develop a school violence prevention program "Modujikimi" for young children to be embedded in IrobiQ, the teacher assistive robot. The themes of this program consisted of basic character education, bullying prevention education and sexual violence prevention education. The activity types included large group, individual and small group activities, free choice activities, and finally parents' education, which included poems, fairy tales, music, art, sharing stories. Finally, the multi modal functions of the robot were employed: image on the screen, TTS (Text To Speech), touch function, recognition of sound and recording system. The robot content was demonstrated to thirty early childhood educators whose acceptability of the content was measured using questionnaires. And also the content was applied to children in daycare center. As a result, majority of them responded positively in acceptability. The results of this study suggest that the further research is needed to improve two-way interactivity of teacher assistive robot.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.142-150
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• 2006

This study examines whether the reinforcement theory would be effectively applied to teaching assistant robots between a robot and a student in the same way as it is applied to teaching methods between a teacher and a student. Participants interact with a teaching assistant robot in a 3 (types of robots: positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement vs. both reinforcements) by 2 (types of participants: honor students vs. backward students), within-subject experiment. Three different types of robots, such as 'Ching-chan-ee' which gives 'positive reinforcement', 'Um-bul-ee' which gives 'negative reinforcement', and 'Sang-bul-ee' which gives both 'positive and negative reinforcement' are designed based on the reinforcement theory and the token reinforcement system. Participants' task performance and reaction rate are measured according to the types of robots and the types of participants. In task performance, the negative reinforcement robot is more effective than the other two types, but regarding the number of stimulus, the less the stimulus is, the more effective the task performance is. Also, participants showed the highest reaction rate on the negative reinforcement robot which implies that the negative reinforcement robot is most effective to motivate students. The findings demonstrate that the participants perceive the teaching assistant robot not as a toy but as a teaching assistant and the reinforcement interaction is important and effective for teaching assistant robots to motivate students. The results of this study can be implicated as an effective guideline to interaction design of teaching assistant robots.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.470-477
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• 2016

This study analyzed the research trends concerning the use of smart devices by young children, such as smart phones, tablet PCs, interactive whiteboards and teacher assistant robots, which has begun to be mentioned relatively recently, and attempted to analyze the characteristics of the research trends and provide guidelines for the direction of future research. A search of articles related to the use of electronic media by young children using an Online Search DB revealed a total of 192 research papers, which were analyzed according to the subject of research, teaching-learning method, area of development and area of activity. It was found that the teaching-learning method, teacher education and professionalism were highly prevalent in the subject of research; the education method integrating play activity with literature activity were highly prevalent in the teaching-learning method; language development and social development were highly prevalent in the area of development; and language activity and social activity were highly prevalent in the area of activity.