Participating in a play is one of integral curriculum for young children at nurseries and kindergartens. At the same time, it is not very easy to successfully run and manage a play for young children due to their low age and immaturity. Scripts are difficult to memorize and children's attention span is quite short. We are exploring the use of a robot and augmented reality (AR) technology to assist the nursery teachers in hopes to alleviate the difficult and complicated task of running the play, and also as a way to increase the learning effect by promoting the concentration and immersion (by the presence of the robot and novelty of the augmented display) [1, 2, 3]. For this purpose, we have devised a semi-autonomous remote-controlled projector robot with the capabilities of background projection and control, generating the synthesized augmented view, camera/movement control, producing story narration and various special effects. We have recently deployed the robot assistant for a play ('Three Little Pigs') at an actual nursery to observe and investigate various aspects of human robot interaction. For instance, the robot interacts with the actors on stage, leading and guiding them by showing (with small display on the robot) the synthesized augmented view, script guidance, and putting forth and changing the backdrop projection. It also assumes the role of the camera man and may instigate minute interplay with the actor as it zooms in and out on actors (by remote control). Our initial observation indicated that the use of the robot and AR indeed exhibited very high potential in drawing the attention of the children and enhancing the educational effect, but required the right amount of autonomy and external control and an intuitive interface.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the biological, mental, social, moral, and educational perceptions of young children of the intelligent robot iRobiQ and to explore the effects of user experience on them. The interview was conducted with 111 five-year-old children attending two kindergartens and two childcare centers in which iRobiQ had been purchased and had been in use since March 2009. The young children interacted with the robot for one hour or less everyday over a period of two weeks or less. The robot contents were related to the socio-emotional perceptions of robots and had a high level of human-robot interactions, such as "Talking with the Robot" or "Attendance Check." Children who experienced the "voice" and "touch screen" functions of the robot showed higher educational perception. The social and educational perception was higher when the robot was placed in a classroom than when it was placed in the hallway or in the office. The results indicated that robot content focusing on socio-emotional characteristics should be developed for educational purposes and that a robot should be placed in the classroom for individual use

Lately, there has been increasing field studies harnessing robots for educational purposes. Various studies into teaching assistant robots (or peer tutoring robots), in particular, are proving to be effective tools of language education because robots are remarkably successful in eliminating the affective filter. However, there is decreased in their interaction with children as time passes. The biggest obstacle to the interaction between human beings and robots in field studies using robots is its low-success rate of face and voice. Since the recognition of robots is weak in real environment such as classrooms, this causes some of the children to utterly give up interaction with robots or just ignore them. Hur and Han (2009) found that the robot storytelling was working to increase children' s tolerance toward the failure of recognition of a robot. Children want to know where the robot comes from, how old it is, who makes it, and when it was born, before they listen to it or its storytelling. The birth story of IROBIQ on an innate weak recognition was created as shown in Table 1. And then the movie on birth story of IROBIQ was developed as shown in Figure 2, and then the facial expression, action, display of IROBIQ were added to it. Figure 1 is the scene of telling the birth story.

This is a case study of the behavior that was observed when young children were given free access to Intelligent Service Robot iRobiQ during their free play time at kindergarten. The investigator conducted a 30-min observation of one class of three-year-olds and one of four-year-olds during their free play time both in the morning and in the afternoon, twice a week, from December 2008 to February 2009. In addition to videotaping the subjects at play, written notes were also recorded of various ways the children utilized the robot and its features. The characteristics studied included the preparation process before a robot was introduced, physical factors (time, distance, and posture) related to the children's utilization of the robot, their reactions to the robot's stimuli (direct stimuli, appearance, built-in contents, and functional error messages), the social relationships among student peers and with their teachers, and the influence of age and gender upon frequency of utilization.