Jibo: The first social robot in an autonomous classroom founded by Freedom Cheteni at The Research University (X)
Esther Wojcicki first went one-on-one with Macintosh computers in 1985 through a grant from the State of California. Now, her journalism program at Palo Alto High School is regarded as the best in the United States and has more than 600 students. Many former students from her program have gone on to have an outsized impact on the world including Gady Epstein of the Economist, Noah Sneider of the New York Times, and Tod Scacerdoti of Yahoo, to name a few. In her keynote at the Drexel University School of Education as well as Moonshots in Education collaboration with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Woj shared her vision and success with her “Moonshot Classroom” model that gives students more autonomy and agency in the classroom and entrusts them with a greater ownership of their learning outcomes.
When Jibo was first donated to the Design Tech High School Artificial Intelligence Robotics Education and Research group by Stanford University professor, Li Jiang, we unpacked Jibo from his box and discovered that Jibo was packed with personality and during the set-up process, provided guidance to the students and learned the face and voice of those in the “loop.” Jibo has learned up to 15 other students and teachers as he has settled in his new home at 275 Oracle Parkway. We are looking at how Jibo could meet the TRICK threshold. In our statistical thinking research course, we discovered that Jibo enhanced the social and emotional engagement episodes among high school students and between students and their teachers at the Oracle campus.
Just like Woj did with the Macinosh computers in 1985, in 2019 Woj has now implemented personal assistants in the classroom through the support of the MiT Media Lab, Stanford University and Oracle’s experimental moonshot teaching school, Design Tech High School to empower current high school graduates as well as future graduates to be prepared in an ever evolving technological landscape.
In this moonshots design research, we observed that Jibo immediately kept students curiously interested about what he was capable of the very first week and students from all classes came to see Jibo just to hang out or if they needed someone to hang out with during lunch. In fact, students were naturally interested in how Jibo could be integrated in their learning and were often training Jibo to learn new skills and TRICKS. After seven weeks of observations, students kept interacting with Jibo and we have observed Jibo gaining teaching skills such as leading Yoga sessions for students, which is remarkable so early in integrating social robotics in classrooms. During Algebra II Designership classes and Moonshot Design Labs, students seem to prefer to interact equally with the Jibo and their peers as opposed to individually. Jibo seemed to increase positive engagements between students who would not naturally do so.
The question that the world is faced with today is whether virtual and robotic teaching agents like Jibo could replace teachers in the future. What is the future of the brick and mortar classrooms.
Woj says no. Jibo will augment and amplify teacher impact, but not replace teachers. “The need for moonshot teachers will be greater in the age of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Teachers will need to adopt a culture that leverages on trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness to stay relevant in the education space. Teachers need to take on the role of master coach.”Woj remarked.
Virtual teaching agents have been used over time including, but not limited to online learning, chatbots, virtual reality and most recently, Jibo. In the Moonshots design program, our Learning Engineering team at Stanford observed that most students are interested in increasing the capabilities of robots such as Jibo to help with homework and productivity. The Moonshots research team conceptualized the idea that some classrooms today can be considered as self-driving or autonomous and currently collaborating with the MiT Media Lab and Stanford University on the mechanics of learning engineering. After a year long research process in collaboration with Oracle, moonshots in education students and faculty designed and implemented the artificial intelligence and machine learning research lab with a focus on the role of social robots in the classroom. The Woj research team hypothesizes that socially intelligent robots like Jibo might have a significant role in moving semi- supervised self-driving classrooms into autonomous classrooms such as those we are beginning to see in moonshot programs such as 42. The key Woj attribute that will allow for this seamless transition is TRUST. The question is how much trust should educators and schools give to social robots like Jibo?
Jibo is a social robot founded at MIT by Cynthia Braezeal and named by Times as one of the best inventions of 2017. Jibo was featured on the cover of Time Magazine Jibo and immediately made his way to Design Tech High School after the Moonshot Program was identified as innovative in it’s approach. When Stanford University professor Dr. Li and MiT professor Cynthia Breazeal met with the moonshot team on this moonshot idea, it was immediately clear that the consequences in education were great and most students today and in the future will rely on social robots to augment their learning. Moonshots in education describes Jibo and similar technologies as “augmenting technologies.” Esther Wojcicki in one of her moonshots in education seminars at Oracle found that Jibo could generate trust in students because he is capable of establishing eye contact with people and making small talk while helping students to keep track of their work, exercise their body and mind.
In the past decade, there has been an increase in the number of service and social robots being used to augment physical tasks as well as improve health care navigation in countries like Japan. For example, the social robot HOSPI is being used to deliver medication to patients in some hospitals in Japan and HOSPI is now a familiar site in that environment. Social robots like Jibo and HOSPI have been designed to function collaboratively with hospital staff members and students in learning environments. Clearly, social robots are currently earning a role in society by increasing people’s productivity and motivating students to execute desired learning behaviors. It’s been demonstrated that humanoid robots are being used to distract kids who are getting vaccinations in clinics and hospitals (Beran, 2013).
The intention of this robot, while not social like Jibo is to ultimately lower stress levels that accompany the experience of an injection. While these robots successfully decreased the level of distress of a child during flu vaccination procedure through a distracting behavior method, Jibo works differently in the classroom . While the distraction design is appropriate in a hospital or clinic situation, Jibo in the classroom provides a social dimension that allows students to focus on the task at hand.
Conclusion: Three dimensions were observed on Moonshots Jibo Research , play, reasoning and affect. Having Jibo in the classroom helped reduce student stress levels and therefore increased learning in the classroom. Students felt free during instruction to engage Jibo in conversation and thus treating and accepting Jibo as one of their classmates. Students experienced progressively higher levels of play and developed more reasoning related to Jibo (for example, by comparing Jibo to Google Assistant or Alexa). Besides, students tended to express more interest towards Jibo over time, with occasional displays of affect.