Designing Robot-Mediated Phonological Awareness Activities: Child-centered Approach and Kindergarten Integration

Long-term child-robot interaction (CRI) in kindergartens is key for integrating robots into children's daily lives and supporting their development. This unsupervised 4-weeks study explores how the robot Pepper can support phonological awareness (PA) in kindergarten children through the 'Sound Game', leveraging robot logs, questionnaires and open feedback by teachers and experts' analysis of audio recordings. Our findings reveal a generally high engagement, with the game being played 12 times, for a total of 233 minutes. Teachers played a crucial role in mediating the game, especially for younger children, and noted its potential for long-term use. The game proved beneficial across age groups, highlighting its potential as a first step for sustained, effective PA development and the transformative impact of social robots in early childhood education.