Pulse: Robots to teach English to Koreans
by edit@cnet.com.au (Leslie Katz)The Yujin iRobiQ is one of the bots that’s had a teaching test run in Korea’s classrooms.
(Credit: Robot Advice)
It should come as no surprise that Korea, the same country that’s building a robot theme park, is planning to send English-teaching bots into its schools. Are we sensing a theme here?
After on-going classroom trials, South Korea will spend approximately US$45 million (AU$50 million) for an “R-Learning” program that places a range of robotic teaching assistants in 500 preschools by 2011 and in 8000 preschools and kindergartens by 2013, according to io9.
For now, the terribly cute robot instructors - which teach via voice recognition and telepresence technology - won’t take over all classroom duties, but will do things like recite stories and lead kids in singalongs aimed at honing their language skills.
The bots, mostly made by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, will help make up for the lack of accredited English teachers in Korea, and if the video below is any indication, they’ll probably do their part to get kids there comfortably early with the idea of robots at the head of the class. Which is probably a good thing, since those who go on to study software programming and hardware engineering will most likely be learning from this humanoid teacher one day.
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