How Will Robots Change Our Future Education?

When your child go back home from school, he or she may be greeted by a charming, cute new member of the family: a gleaming white interactive robot that gestures dramatically, cracks odd jokes, and shows vivid 3D cartoon animations of life-like dinosaurs, animals, and vehicles. If the child laugh at these antics, and the robot can see their faces, it will giggle along with them.

Honeybot, an interactive companion robot for kids, is one of the most revolutionary educational robots. It is a teacher, storyteller, and the best friend of kids. With ridiculously cute and friendly appearance, Honeybot facilitates learning experience of children ages 3~8 with general knowledge, fun, fantasy, and good daily habits. The coolest thing is that Honeybot integrates various AR (Augmented Reality) applications. This adorable toy is currently in development with help from a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

Honeybot is not the only one who spies an opportunity in the booming education industry. With significant progress currently being made toward safer and more intuitive industrial robotics, it is perhaps unsurprising that the idea of personalized educational robots is gaining momentum. How will robots re-shape the way of future education? As ground-breaking technologies become greater enabling force, I believe that the core values of education will change dramatically.

First, memorization and repeatable skills will become significantly less important. With the development of brain chip integration, knowledge itself can be downloaded or even updated automatically. Meanwhile, robots can enable us to overcome the limitations of our minds and senses. Traditional manual learning process of information sensing, collecting, analyzing and storage may be performed by robots instead. But the creative works will not be replaced by machines. That is because innovation relies on the ability of connecting weak associations or discovering hidden facts, which are the natural strengths of human. So the time has come to re-think education and to re-cast it as an innovative and personalized process. We need to move away from rewarding memorization and instead prize curiosity and innovation.

Second, lifelong learning will be crucial in the robotics era. Various life-long learning resources will become available for the general public to enhance personal skills development. In such context, most knowledge examinations as well as professional certifications will be eliminated. In addition, school curriculums should also be modernized to encourage creative problem finding and solving, and learning through doing. Experimentation will become the building blocks of discovering and understanding the things we do not know yet. People with strong lifelong learning capabilities will achieve greater success eventually.

Third, enhancing EQs as well as communications skills will become a more crucial part of education. Given that robots are more specialized at performing works with hard skills, soft skills will become the ultimate differentiating factor between robots and human. We will still eager to meet with those talented people at conferences or forums to exchange niche ideas. The robots may have much higher IQs than human, but true emotional intelligence still has a long way to go. The EQs of robots may be just limited to mimicking the appearance and timing of human emotion. So the best human jobs of the future may involve soft skills better measured by EQs than IQs, by jobs creating social as much as financial value.

Robots will become an essential part in our future learning endeavor. Through our personal data, we will have the opportunity to train our own teachers and become more effective hybrid learners. Innovative experimentation, lifelong learning, and soft skills will become the key success factors in education for everyone in the robotics era. While robots are enabling us to better explore and understand ourselves as well as the surrounding world, we are the ultimate power that can change the world with new insights and opportunities.