The Rhyme Racer game is designed to help children develop rhyming, phonological awareness, and pronunciation skills. It is a fast-paced, fun, and competitive game with a robot, in which children race the robot to identify and say a word that rhymes with the ‘target’ word in each round. Each round, the game uses the information from previous rounds to learn about a child’s individual rhyming and pronunciation skills and adjusts the content of the next round of words to maximize the child’s learning.

Additional Technical information: It is difficult to program robots and games for interactive social behavior during educational co-play, in part because the interaction takes place in a high-dimensional state space with noisy state dynamics and sparse rewards. Moreover, an effective program must balance multiple objectives across different time scales, such as teaching new words, acquiring information about the student to model their knowledge, and keeping the interaction fun and engaging. This project aims to address these challenges for educational co-play by developing testbeds for learning algorithms, developing a computational framework formulating educational co-play as a planning problem, and using Gaussian processes with a kernel using concept-distance and phonetic similarity of children’s responses to model student knowledge.

Selected Publications:

A Social Robot System for Modeling Children’s Word Pronunciation AAMAS 2018

Learning Behavior Policies for Interactive Educational Play Models, Robotics Science and Systems: Workshop on Algorithms, and HRI