Moveable Älıpbi: Design of Montessori-Based Child-Robot Interaction for Long-Term Alphabet Learning

Kazakhstan has adopted an alphabet reform and is planning to fully transition the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin script by 2031. This places young learners at a significant disadvantage, creating unwanted challenges to early and continuous literacy development and acquisition of the new script. In light of the alphabet transition, there appears a need to design effective learning solutions to boost children’s motivation in acquiring the Kazakh Latin alphabet. The Montessori method has proven itself helpful for young children’s self-directed and developmentally appropriate literacy acquisition. These core ideas have been carefully adopted to establish design principles for the robotic system that adheres to the principles of the Montessori pedagogy. In this paper, we propose the Moveable Älıpbi robotic system and detail its interaction design life cycle from understanding users and establishing requirements to designing, implementing robot behaviours, and validating them with the Montessori practitioner. The process involved multiple iterations where the system was tested with children in specific age groups, and the learning activities were modified accordingly. To evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a mixed-subject design experiment with 60 Kazakh children aged 8–10 years old from a local public school where we compared the proposed Moveable Älıpbi robotic system with a baseline Montessori human teacher over five sessions. The results demonstrate the potential of the robot as a Montessori teacher in providing foundational letter acquisition over multiple sessions. Implications for improving the interaction design and activities are discussed based on the findings.