Robots help kids tell stories—with a little help from stuffed animals | CU Boulder Today

Banner picture: Layne Hubbard’s assortment of stuffed animals for serving to kids tell tales. (Credit: Layne Hubbard)

Layne Hubbard is aware of the ability of a stuffed animal.

In 2016, the artist and aspiring neuroscientist paid an impromptu go to to a youngsters’s thrift retailer. On one of many cabinets, she noticed a stuffed zebra with pink ft and a pocket with a zipper on its again.

Hubbard thought it was excellent. At the time, she was a doctoral pupil at CU Boulder pursuing a triple PhD in laptop science, cognitive science and neuroscience. She had simply launched a analysis and design studio referred to as MindScribe that seeks to show abnormal toys like this one into robots that may help kids tell stories—with the help of human-computer interplay applied sciences. Now, she’s lately joined forces with the Digital Learning Lab and PBSKids on an effort to develop synthetic intelligence for the TV present “Elinor Wonders Why.” Soon, the inquisitive bunny on the middle of the present will be capable to ask younger viewers questions and hear for his or her responses.

“I think of storytelling as an ancient technology,” stated Hubbard, who completed her doctoral diploma in 2021 and is now a computing innovation fellow on the University of California Irvine by means of funding by the National Science Foundation.

It’s an historic know-how, however perhaps one which new developments can soak up contemporary instructions.

The MindScribe course of begins when youngsters, often round 4 or 5 years outdated, make a piece of artwork, corresponding to a drawing or a Lego tower. They then plop their favourite stuffed animal on high of a smartphone (or tuck the cellphone into a handy pocket). An app asks the kids open-ended questions on their creation: “Tell me a story about what you made,” or “then what happened?” And the all-important “why?”

Through a sequence of latest research, Hubbard and her colleagues at CU Boulder have put the know-how to the take a look at, revealing the promise and limitations of storytelling know-how. Her group has discovered that kids appear surprisingly open to speaking to robots. In one experiment, for instance, a 4-year-old spent 24 minutes telling a stuffed tiger a story referred to as “The Space Story From Fly Guy.” Hubbard believes that such actions might help kids to develop vital cognitive expertise at a crucial age for studying—and perhaps even work by means of troublesome life experiences. 

She stated the outcomes present what little kids are able to after they can take cost of their very own tales.

“I remember what it was like being a young child and having a lot of strong ideas about the world,” Hubbard stated. “Kids may be small, but their ideas are mighty, and they deserve a place alongside adults’ ideas.”

Learning to tell tales

Hubbard has seen a lot of these mighty concepts firsthand. 

Before she earned a bachelor’s diploma in laptop science from CU Boulder in 2015, Hubbard taught preschool in Boulder. There, she realized learn how to interact in a storytelling train together with her younger pupils. She’d sit down subsequent to them and admire their newest masterpiece—a crayon drawing, say, of a hungry, hungry caterpillar. 

“So I’d say, ‘Tell me a story about that caterpillar,’” Hubbard stated. “They’d say, ‘Well, it was looking for a leaf.’ And I’d write that down to show them that their words matter.”

The train faucets into the elemental human have to tell tales. Stories, the scientist stated, permit kids to stretch their imaginations and replicate on their distinctive concepts in regards to the world. But these expertise additionally should be realized, stated Eliana Colunga, an affiliate professor within the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder.

“One of the things that make human beings so special in comparison to other animals is our ability to think about things that aren’t real and to make plans for the future,” stated Colunga, who was certainly one of Hubbard’s doctoral advisors. “That’s not something that a 2-year-old can do naturally.”

Hubbard, nevertheless, famous that too many kids within the U.S. don’t all the time have supportive adults of their lives to hearken to their tales. When she was between 5- and 6-years-old, she and her siblings lived in foster houses in Michigan.

“My imagination as a child was one of the main ways that I protected myself and created space for myself when I didn’t always have external support,” Hubbard stated. “That time period helps me remember that young children have big ideas of their own. But young children also have big challenges of their own.”

Artificial intelligence might be able to help, she added—below the precise circumstances. 

From feelings to alien planets

The know-how underlying MindScribe is easy by design. It listens to kids as they tell their tales, waits for them to pause, then prompts them with these open-ended questions. When the youngsters say “I’m done,” the robotic asks them to wrap up their story by giving it a title. Hubbard’s group has additionally programmed their robotic to talk 14 completely different languages. 

The thought, she stated, is to place kids and their tales first.

To take a look at the way it works, she and her colleagues ran a digital experiment in 2020 on the peak of the pandemic. The group recruited 33 younger kids (and their favourite stuffed animals) from throughout the U.S. to make a piece of artwork, then speak about it. 

Hubbard was amazed by the response. The youngsters, who had been 4- or 5-years-old, instructed their stuffies a numerous vary of typically subtle tales. Some described how they made their artwork (“Then I made my papa. And then I made my mommy.”). Others instructed imaginative, even interplanetary tales (“Then he jumped to Jupiter. And then Saturn.”). Some processed occasions from their lives (“I ‘goed’ to school, and my friends were not listening.”).

“There was a lot of conflict with teachers and things that happened at birthday parties,” Hubbard stated. “Even experiences like funerals and deaths in the family. For educators and parents, it’s really helpful to know that those things are on their minds.”

Hubbard and her colleagues introduced their first set of outcomes nearly this summer time on the ACM Conferences on Creativity & Cognition and Conversational User Interfaces. 

But the train additionally confirmed the place AI know-how would possibly fall brief. Most synthetic voices available on the market, Hubbard stated, sound like adults. In different phrases, they’re boring. Many of her younger research individuals, in distinction, wished to work together with different kids and even foolish characters. One younger little one was confused about why his Pikachu stuffed animal talked like a mum or dad and never within the squeaky voice of that yellow Pokémon. 

A menagerie of robots

Throughout the undertaking, Hubbard and her colleagues have additionally strived to maintain the youngsters who use their know-how secure. Her storytelling app can’t hook up with the web, doesn’t entry your cellphone’s information and doesn’t file what kids say.

“It is one thing for technology to respect privacy and quite another for people to feel confident that privacy is being respected,” stated Clayton Lewis, one other of Hubbard’s advisors and a fellow within the Institute for Cognitive Science at CU Boulder. “This is a tough challenge, and I expect that Layne will be among those who contribute to resolving it.”

MindScribe isn’t accessible for obtain but, Hubbard stated. 

But as she heads to California for her fellowship, she’s hoping to companion with toy builders and others to proceed designing new academic merchandise. Today, her stuffed zebra additionally has some firm: Hubbard retains a shelf stuffed with animal robots, together with a prairie canine, owl and raccoon. 

“There’s no denying that our human-human interactions will always be the most important,” Hubbard stated. “But toys let us do different things. They allow us to get messy with our ideas.”