Supporting Family-School Partnerships with Robot-Facilitated Home-Based Activities
Michael F Xu, Qiyao Yang, Heather Kirkorian, Bilge Mutlu
TLDR
A robot-facilitated system helps families overcome barriers to family-school partnerships through home-based activities.
Key contributions
- Co-designed a social robot system with families to facilitate home-based school activities.
- Conducted a week-long, in-home study with 10 families to evaluate robot integration and use.
- Found parental facilitation styles shaped robot use and identified perceived helpfulness and challenges.
- Offers empirical insights and design implications for future family- and child-robot interactions.
Why it matters
This paper explores a novel approach using social robots to strengthen family-school partnerships, addressing common barriers like time and communication. It provides valuable insights into how robots can be integrated into daily family life to support children's development. The findings offer practical design implications for future technologies in this crucial area.
Original Abstract
Family-school partnerships (FSP) are critical to children's development, yet families often face barriers such as time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited opportunities for meaningful engagement. As a step toward facilitating broader family-school partnerships, we explore a novel approach that integrates a social robot into family settings, specifically supporting home-based activities. Through interviews and co-design sessions, we designed and developed a robotic system informed by both parents and children, that supported, among other interactions, family communication about school topics. We evaluated the robot in a week-long, in-home study with 10 families. Our findings show how families integrated the robot into daily life, how parental facilitation styles shaped use, and how families perceived both the helpfulness and challenges of the robot. We contribute empirical insights, a modular system, and design implications for family- and child-robot interactions. We discuss ethical and privacy considerations, and broaden the design space for technologies supporting family-school partnerships.
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