How Children’s Individual Needs Challenge the Design of Educational Robotics Marjo Virnes and Erkki Sutinen Department of Computer Science and Statistics University of Joensuu P.O.Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland {marjo.virnes, erkki.sutinen}@cs.joensuu.fi Eija Kärnä-Lin Department of Special Education University of Joensuu P.O.Box 111, 80101 Joensuu, Finland eija.karna-lin@joensuu.fi ABSTRACT Educational robotics has the potential for improving special needs education and for eliminating barriers to learning if it can be focused squarely on the special needs of children. This case study examines a variety of special needs that have the potential to enrich educational robotic design. Educational robotics should be used to meet the individual needs of children and to expose them to the possibilities of various forms of self-expression and exploration. It should facilitate advanced hands-on programming, increase the rate of two-directional communication between child and robot, and improve the quality of instruction and intervention. We designed this study as a qualitative action research project with eight special needs education children who worked with LEGO  Mindstorms  NXT and Topobo robots over a nine-month period. The research convinced us that properly adapted educational robotics can be suited to a variety of users who have different individual needs. ACM Classification Keywords K.3.1 [Computers and education]: Computer Uses in Education – collaborative learning, computer-assisted instruction. INTRODUCTION The growing number of children in special needs education necessitates an improvement in the methods of educating such children by decreasing their barriers to learning. In Finland 22% of elementary and secondary school students present with various learning disabilities and so receive special needs education in regular schools. Of this number, 8% receive special needs education in special education settings [15]. It has become necessary in such circumstances to tailor educational technology and robotics applications to the needs of individual students and so enhance their potential for quality learning experiences. A robot technology that is used to teach specific subject content or that is designed to function as a constructing and programming tool for promoting learning is part of the discipline of educational robotics. Past research and development in educational robotics has tended to focus mainly on science education and the teaching of mathematics, programming, science, engineering and physics [8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Although robotics has been fairly widely used in the past in special needs education, it has focused mainly on problems of rehabilitation and therapy and on the production of assistive tools for playing and learning (see, for example, [13]). The extent to which existing educational robotics can take individual differences in special needs education into account has not yet therefore been the subject of intensive research. The purpose of this study is to investigate the state of robotics in special needs education by exploring two robotic technologies that have already been used in special needs education and by describing some further dimensions of special needs. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, we asked the following two questions: “What are children’s individual needs when they work with robotics?” and “How do educational robotics meet these needs?” We arrived at answers to the research questions by making use of a case study in an actual environment and by analyzing how children worked in their technology lessons with tangible technology called Topobo [11], a digital manipulative called LEGO  Mindstorms  NXT [4]. The research outcomes offered various answers to our practical concerns, and we expect that our conclusions and evaluations will be useful for guiding some aspects of the design of future educational robotics research. We undertook the study in the context of the Technologies for Children with Individual Needs Project between September 2006 and May 2007. The project was conducted by researchers from the Educational Technology research group, EdTech Δ1 in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics in collaboration with special education researchers from the Department of Special Education at the University of Joensuu, Finland. The article begins with a description of the background to the study. We then present the research participants, our methodological choices, the research settings, and our research ethics. After the section on method, we describe 1 EdTech Δ . http://cs.joensuu.fi/edtech/ Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. 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