Between 2004 and 2007, we conducted a long-term field study at an Early Childhood Education Center in San Diego, CA in which we immersed ourselves and a small humanoid robot into a classroom of children between 10 to 24 months old. The original goal was to explore the uses of educational robots; however, through this exploratory field study, we discovered various insights for making an engaging robot for children. This study is now widely recognized as a classic study of child-robot interaction.
- Fumihide Tanaka, Aaron Cicourel, Javier R. Movellan: Socialization between Toddlers and Robots at an Early Childhood Education Center, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), Vol.104(46), pp.17954-17958, 2007 [pdf, 801KB] [The movie files referred in this paper are also available at the PNAS web: here]
(Updated on June 26, 2019)