SOCIABOTS: A Robotic Approach for Special Education Children to Improve their Social Skills

Social behavior for special-needs children is crucial to ensure that the special-needs
children know how to communicate and establish social relationship with others.
Children with special-needs such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit
Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), Down syndrome and Slow Learner usually have
problems in socializing as they usually have empathy deficit. The current pedagogy used
by teachers also are unattractive making them unable to attract the children’s attention
and making them unable to stimulate the children’s kinetic senses and tactile senses thus
affecting the learning rates of the special-needs children. Therefore, to address this
issues, SOCIABOTS, a NAO robotic approach for the special education children to
improve their social skills is developed as to aid teachers in their teaching process. This
robotic application is able to play shapes game with the special-needs children and dance
after they accomplish the task correctly. It is a perfect solution for both of the specialneeds
children and the special education teachers as it caters both needs. This robotic
module focuses on making learning turn taking attractive to sustain the special-needs
children’ attention while stimulating their tactile and kinetic senses. The RAD
methodology is used for development of this robotic module. Surveys, interviews and
observations are the source of data to gather information and opinion for the
development of SOCIABOTS. A shape recognition test is conducted to determine which
background color works better in recognizing shapes. A field test at the Sekolah
Kebangsaan Sultan Yussuf, Batu Gajah, Perak with 5 special education students was
conducted to compare the effectiveness of SOCIABOTS against the current pedagogy
used by teachers. The results show that SOCIABOTS helps in sustaining the specialneeds
children’ attention and helps in assisting the teachers in teaching. It scores better
compared to the current pedagogy that the teachers used in classes. This module is
focusing on assisting teachers in their teaching process and helps special-needs children
learning taking turns interactively thus improving their social skills.