(March 4, 2015) Who
is the teacher: the student or the machine? By showing a robot how to write
letters, children improve their writing skills and gain self-‐confidence.
This system, called CoWriter, was developed by EPFL researchers.
A little girl lines up plastic letters fitted with QR codes
in front of a little humanoid robot. The robot struggles to reproduce them on a
tablet – especially the loop of the letter p. The girl kindly steps in to help,
writing out the word to show the robot how to do it. She puts in effort to
teach the robot... without realizing that in reality she is the one who is
improving her writing skills. Yesterday, EPFL researchers presented their new
teaching tool, called CoWriter, at the "Conference on Human-‐Robot
Interaction (HRI)", an important event in the field of interactive
robotics, held in Portland, USA.