University of Tsukuba
Fumihide Tanaka Laboratory

EN

Educational Apps

Dr. Fumihide Tanaka served as a consultant for SoftBank Robotics Corp. in which he supervised the development of a commercial educational application on Pepper, a personal robot. This application was designed based on the concept of the care-receiving robot (CRR) explained in this page. Users can teach Pepper, for example, a color, red with showing a red ball to it, which results in helping the users learn the word, red. This process was designed as a learning scenario for foreign language (e.g. English vocabulary learning for Japanese children).

Also, this application incorporates several knowledge obtained from our past researches. An example is about haptic interactions. We noticed the power of haptic interactions between children and robots (see our PNAS paper) and designed these interaction opportunities in several ways within the application. This is very effective to let children engaged in the robot and the learning application.

(Updated on June 27, 2019)