Newcomer children face barriers in acquiring the host country's language and literacy programs are often constrained by limited staffing, mixed-proficiency cohorts, and short contact time. While Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) show promise in education, their use in these socio-emotionally sensitive settings remains underexplored. This research presents a co-design study with program tutors and coordinators, to explore the design space for a social robot, Maple. We contribute (1) a domain summary outlining four recurring challenges, (2) a discussion on cultural orientation and community belonging with robots, (3) an expert-grounded discussion of the perceived role of an SAR in cultural and language learning, and (4) preliminary design guidelines for integrating an SAR into a classroom. These expert-grounded insights lay the foundation for iterative design and evaluation with newcomer children and their families.
@article{arxiv.2603.26674,
title = {Co-designing a Social Robot for Newcomer Children's Cultural and Language Learning},
author = {Neil Fernandes and Tehniyat Shahbaz and Emily Davies-Robinson and Yue Hu and Kerstin Dautenhahn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26674},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
In proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026)