"You've got a friend in me": Co-Designing a Peer Social Robot for Young Newcomers' Language and Cultural Learning

2026-03-19

AI Summary

This study addresses the limited access to personalized English language and cultural learning support for newly immigrated children in community literacy programs, often due to constrained staffing. To bridge this gap, the authors collaborated with educators to design Maple, a desktop-based peer-like social assistive robot that functions as a practice partner within instructor-led sessions. Maple facilitates language acquisition and cultural understanding through interactive short stories, multimodal scaffolding—including speech, facial expressions, and gestures—and embedded formative quizzes. The work introduces a “human-in-the-loop” interaction paradigm, integrating actionable formative feedback into authentic educational contexts. In doing so, it not only articulates design principles for deploying social robots in community settings but also offers methodological guidance for child-centered evaluation in real-world environments.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning

Abstract

Community literacy programs supporting young newcomer children in Canada face limited staffing and scarce one-to-one time, which constrains personalized English and cultural learning support. This paper reports on a co-design study with United for Literacy tutors that informed Maple, a table-top, peer-like Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) designed as a practice partner within tutor-mediated sessions. From shadowing and co-design interviews, we derived newcomer-specific requirements and added them in an integrated prototype that uses short story-based activities, multi-modal scaffolding (speech, facial feedback, gesture), and embedded quizzes that support attention while producing tutor-actionable formative signals. We contribute system design implications for tutor-in-the-loop SARs supporting language socialization in community settings and outline directions for child-centered evaluation in authentic programs.

Problem

• newcomer children
• language learning
• cultural learning
• community literacy programs
• personalized support

Innovation

• Socially Assistive Robot
• co-design
• tutor-in-the-loop
• multimodal scaffolding
• language socialization