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Can robots replace teachers in school classrooms?
The human role, value, and assistance that teachers provide
Do robots teaching students in a classroom seem to you like a distant dream?
The current state of innovation in education proves you right so far. But even so, automation is gaining ground in classrooms more discretely. Whether content recommendation, grade assessment, or curriculum builder software, growing educational solutions are addressing very specific needs from teachers.
Will they ever replace human educators? To answer this question, we might consider the role teachers embody in the classroom, the values they convey to their students, and where technology can intervene.
Here’s the story of educational robots, and how they can collaborate with teachers to share human knowledge.
The first educational robots
Putting a robot in the classroom might seem like a crazy idea. But researchers and engineers have been attempting to do this for a long time. Before building a self-sustaining educational experience, these pioneering inventors sought first to prove that such human-machine interaction is possible.
In the 2000s, engineers from the Tokyo University of Science designed Saya, a humanoid robot that could react to students’ behavior in full autonomy. With human stance, emotionally expressive face features, and vocalization capabilities, the robot could call the roll, deliver a lesson, and monitor students’ actions. The illusion was so impressive that elementary school students could feel a real sense of presence despite Saya’s obvious imperfections.
This first successful experimentation gave ideas to other inventors to test the concept on less ambitious applications, but with more realistic goals. For example, robotics companies have designed playmate-like robots, to provide interactive learning experiences to younger users.
While maintaining eye contact with students, SoftBank’s NAO gains their full attention with educational games. One concrete…
