• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.455-466
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to develop a school violence prevention program "Modujikimi" for young children to be embedded in IrobiQ, the teacher assistive robot. The themes of this program consisted of basic character education, bullying prevention education and sexual violence prevention education. The activity types included large group, individual and small group activities, free choice activities, and finally parents' education, which included poems, fairy tales, music, art, sharing stories. Finally, the multi modal functions of the robot were employed: image on the screen, TTS (Text To Speech), touch function, recognition of sound and recording system. The robot content was demonstrated to thirty early childhood educators whose acceptability of the content was measured using questionnaires. And also the content was applied to children in daycare center. As a result, majority of them responded positively in acceptability. The results of this study suggest that the further research is needed to improve two-way interactivity of teacher assistive robot.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.532-540
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to explore young children's perception of IrobiQ, the teacher assistive robot. Participants of this study were fifty 5 year olds attending 3 kindergarten centers who had experienced the robot for at least 2 years. The study was conducted based on the "the hypothesis of speech register". Each child was read a storybook by a researcher and asked to choose which one is more suitable to human speech tones and accents among a robot, a friend, and a toy. The findings of this study were that the children perceived a robot as a hybrid compound entity, not as a complete human though they perceived it closer to a human than an artificial thing. They were likely to use cognitive distinctions which is unique to human being, as the criteria to verify their answers. These results would suggest that the traditional binary ontological category(animate vs. inanimate) is reconsidered to include an hybrid entity.