At school with robots: a new generation of interconnected mediators and augmented reality to learn to write and play more easily

On February 12th and 13th the international kick-off meeting of the Conbots project coordinated byUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and developed with universities and companies in the United Kingdom, Serbia, Belgium and Israel

Rome, 11 February 2020 - The school of the future it will have pupils who learn to write or play a musical instrument helped by connected robots. A possible scenario in the coming years thanks to the Conbots project coordinated byUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma which will see its kick off meeting on 12 and 13 February in Rome, in the presence of all the project partners.

Conbots means “CONnected through roBOTS” and is the first project that aims to increase the physical interaction between two human beings through the use of robots. Funded with almost five million euros from the European framework program "Horizon 2020", the project will last 3 and a half years. The project partners are Imperial College London, the University of Ghent in Belgium, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, and three international industrial companies such as IBM, IUVO and ARVRtech. 

Aimed in particular at children and those who need to learn new motor skills, Conbots will design and test a new class of connected robots in educational scenarios through which to facilitate motor learning, alongside the figure of the traditional master: it is a new collaborative perspective between man and machine.

"Goal of the project – highlights the coordinator of Conbots, Domenico Formica ofUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma - it will be to allow learners to learn new complex motor tasks, such as writing or playing a musical instrument, by introducing a new generation of robots capable of physically connecting people to each other in the learning processes. This will allow the two subjects involved to cooperate in an innovative way, whether they are the teacher and the pupil, two pupils or even a robot and the pupil”.

Recent neuroscientific studies indeed suggest that you learn a new motor task more quickly by working in pairs. Conbots will make this new way of collaborating usable, capable of providing the user with richer feedback than traditional teaching methods. A possible result also thanks to augmented reality tools and real "educational video games" developed within Conbots.