Accompany Children's Learning for You: An Intelligent Companion Learning System

Abstract

Nowadays, parents attach importance to their children's primary education but often lack time and correct pedagogical principles to accompany their children's learning. Besides, existing learning systems cannot perceive children's emotional changes. They may also cause children's self‐control and cognitive problems due to smart devices such as mobile phones and tablets. To tackle these issues, we propose an intelligent companion learning system to accompany children in learning English words, namely the Intelligent Augmented Reality Educator (IARE). The IARE realizes the perception and feedback of children's engagement through the intelligent agent (IA) module, and presents the humanized interaction based on projective Augmented Reality (AR). Specifically, IA perceives the children's learning engagement change and spelling status in real‐time through our online lightweight temporal multiple instance attention module and character recognition module, based on which analyses the performance of the individual learning process and gives appropriate feedback and guidance. We allow children to interact with physical letters, thus avoiding the excessive interference of electronic devices. To test the efficacy of our system, we conduct a pilot study with 14 English learning children. The results show that our system can significantly improve children's intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy.