De Haas has been involved with L2TOR from the beginning. Last April she defended her thesis 'Staying engaged in child-robot interaction: A quantitative approach to studying preschoolers' engagement with robots and tasks during second-language tutoring'. With success; she received her PhD.

Gestures as an advantage for learning performance
De Haas on her research: "In education, we are increasingly dependent on digital tools. COVID-19 has demonstrated this once again. During the corona period, digital tools would have been very useful for teachers. Robots, for example, that, unlike tablets, can use their bodies to behave similarly to teachers."

That recognizability then lies in things like gestures while talking, the PhD student reveals. Or by pointing to objects. "Children can concentrate better this way, research shows. An advantage for their learning performance. Moreover, robots enable children to interact socially. Much more so than when using tablets. And that is especially important when learning a second language."

European collaboration
L2TOR was launched as part of Horizon 2020; an EU funding program for research and innovation. It is a collaboration between 6 European universities (including Tilburg University) and 2 companies that developed the robots. The main experiment was a large-scale field study in which about 200 Dutch children learned English words during 7 lessons. This study showed that children successfully learn from robot Robin.

By the way, there was also a "but. The robot did not necessarily perform better than a tablet. Children learned as many words with the robot as with the tablet. De Haas: "It did turn out that children are more involved when a robot uses gestures than when it does not. This prompted me to write my own dissertation."

The future of Robin
Because development in the field of AI has been very rapid in recent years, new technology can be added to social robots all the time. "So there is still plenty to experiment with." De Haas enthusiastically lists a number of new research questions. "Because of these new techniques, for example, a robot can increasingly work independently, without a human instructor. How does this affect teaching? Or what can Robin teach older children, who already have a broader basic knowledge?" Her enthusiasm is partly fueled by the environment in which she operates, the PhD student indicates. "The dynamic MindLabs ecosystem inspires. When I'm working here, it immediately motivates me."