Robot Assisted Reading: A Preliminary Study on the Robotic Storytelling Service to Children in the Library

It is important for the modern library to cultivate the public’s information literacy and reading literacy. When these two important tasks can be rooted in the children’s readers, the function of the library can be even more meaningful and demanded. Therefore, all public libraries try their best to attract more children to come to the library, and naturally parents come together with children to enjoy reading in the library. Because children have only limited vocabulary ability, reading plain written books is very difficult for them and it is not even effective. As a result, various digital children’s readings have been developed over the years, such as pictures (picture books), audio (CD audio books), and video (multimedia e-books). However, the interaction between these materials and children is limited to 2D flat touches, such as texts, pictures, and audios/videos. Children would not feel touched and interactive when listening to the stories read by adults who have no training for reading aloud skills. Therefore, this study intends to combine the robot with the existing digital picture books of the library to complete a “robotic storytelling service for children.” In this study, we designed a scenario that combined a digital picture book with added robot voices and body postures/movements that match the mood of stories. This allows the robot to tell a story and perform a story like a human being with body movements to attract children’s interest and attention. And the robot can also draw the children’s attention to the story and increase the listening effects. This service has received a very enthusiastic response from the children readers. It also enabled the children to be close to the robots and listened to the robots to tell stories for them in a very focused and exciting manner. Furthermore, they seem to be motivated to go to the library to find the corresponding story books to read. Therefore, the robotic storytelling approach may have a potential to promote children’s reading interests and can be widely implemented in the future.