Supporting Family-School Partnerships with Robot-Facilitated Home-Based Activities

TL;DR

This paper presents a robot-assisted system designed to enhance family-school partnerships by supporting home-based activities, communication, and engagement, evaluated through a week-long in-home study with families.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modular robotic system informed by user input, providing empirical insights and design implications for family-robot interactions in educational contexts.

Findings

Families integrated the robot into daily routines.

Parental facilitation influenced robot usage.

Families found the robot helpful but faced challenges.

Abstract

Family-school partnerships (FSP) are critical to children's development, yet families often face barriers such as time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited opportunities for meaningful engagement. As a step toward facilitating broader family-school partnerships, we explore a novel approach that integrates a social robot into family settings, specifically supporting home-based activities. Through interviews and co-design sessions, we designed and developed a robotic system informed by both parents and children, that supported, among other interactions, family communication about school topics. We evaluated the robot in a week-long, in-home study with 10 families. Our findings show how families integrated the robot into daily life, how parental facilitation styles shaped use, and how families perceived both the helpfulness and challenges of the robot. We contribute empirical insights, a modular system, and design implications for family- and child-robot interactions. We discuss ethical and privacy considerations, and broaden the design space for technologies supporting family-school partnerships.