The WordQuest game is being designed to help develop a child’s vocabulary. It is a collaborative game, with a robot, similar to the classic game “I Spy”. In it a child and a robot take turns. The tablet may show a picture of an object from the scene and ask the player to say what it is, or it may say a word (and shows the written word) and then they take turns identifying the picture of that word on the touchscreen tablet.

A child and robot can also explore the scene by looking around it zooming in and out, and clicking on the various objects, and the tablet will tell them what the object is (and provide the written word for that object). The current version of the game has two scenes, “outdoor” and “indoor”, that in total contain 50 animated, clickable objects for children to learn. Each game quest (e.g., “can you find objects that are in crimson?”) contains one target vocabulary word (e.g., “crimson”) for the child to learn

The game is designed to help the child learn its meaning by taking turns with the robot and finding the objects in the scene that represent the target word’s meaning. When four correct objects are collected either by the child or the robot, the quest is completed.

Additional Technical information: The game is implemented in the Unity 3D game engine, which supports flexible updates and changes of learning curriculum. During the game play, the robot may switch its role between “learner” and “tutor” roles to best promote a child’s learning, based on its assessment on their learning progress. The computational model used to guide the robot’s action is built using Reinforcement Learning.

Selected Publications:

Chen, H., Park, H.W., Dong, X., Breazeal, C. (in review). Active Role Adaptation for Social Robot Learning Companion. In proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2019)