Robot Teachers in Our Children's Future

Dennis Baron is a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain. In a lengthy post republished at the science fiction blog io9, he writes about how robots are increasingly useful in the classroom -- and that we shouldn't fear them:

We need this invasion of English-teaching robots because, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, "an unprecedented number of children in the US start public school with major deficits in basic academic skills, including vocabulary skills." So computer scientists at UCSD's Machine Perception Laboratory designed RUBI, a "sociable robot" who successfully taught a group of toddlers ten vocabulary words in only twelve days. RUBI improved the children's word-mastery by a full 25% compared to a control set of words not taught by the mechanical wonder.

Link | Image: Nathan Stillie