The Key Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Early Childhood Education: A Review

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of key AI technologies used in early childhood education, highlighting trends, challenges, and future research directions, especially focusing on AI robots and autism spectrum disorder interventions.

Contribution

It offers an up-to-date, in-depth review of AI applications in ECE, filling the gap of lack of survey articles and guiding future research.

Findings

AI in ECE is rapidly growing with diverse applications.

Robotics and autism intervention are prominent AI applications.

Open questions and future trends are discussed in detail.

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been applied in various domains, including early childhood education (ECE). Integration of AI educational technology is a recent significant trend in ECE. Currently, there are more and more studies of AI in ECE. To date, there is a lack of survey articles that discuss the studies of AI in ECE. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date and in-depth overview of the key AI technologies in ECE that provides a historical perspective, summarizes the representative works, outlines open questions, discusses the trends and challenges through a detailed bibliometric analysis, and provides insightful recommendations for future research. We mainly discuss the studies that apply AI-based robots and AI technologies to ECE, including improving the social interaction of children with an autism spectrum disorder. This paper significantly contributes to provide an up-to-date and in-depth survey that is suitable as introductory material for beginners to AI in ECE, as well as supplementary material for advanced users.