Cute Little Robot Helps Children Argue Better

Resolving conflict is hard. It’s even tougher when you are a kid and haven’t quite mastered the skill of productive arguing. Keepon, a cute little social robot, is being tested by researchers to see if social robots in general could be used as a way to teach children conflict resolution.

Keepon isn’t really doing anything that an adult couldn’t do; and it’s not autonomous, with two people remotely controlling everything that it says and all the movements that it makes. But the point of this research was to see whether a social robot could be used beneficially in situations like this: Would the children resolve conflicts more effectively with the help of the robot than they would by themselves?

Read more about Keepon and this robotic project on IEEE Spectrum.