Supporting Family-School Partnerships with Robot-Facilitated Home-Based Activities

2026-04-26

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges families face in deeply engaging with school–home collaboration due to time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited effective participation channels. It pioneers the integration of social robots into domestic settings to support family-centered, school-related activities and enhance home–school coordination. Through a user co-design approach, the authors developed a modular social robot system and employed interviews alongside in-home studies to investigate how parental scaffolding styles influence human–robot interaction. A one-week field deployment across ten households demonstrated the feasibility of embedding the robot into everyday family routines, revealing its potential to heighten caregivers’ sense of involvement while also uncovering practical challenges in real-world implementation.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Social networks and social learning
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web

Abstract

Family-school partnerships (FSP) are critical to children's development, yet families often face barriers such as time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited opportunities for meaningful engagement. As a step toward facilitating broader family-school partnerships, we explore a novel approach that integrates a social robot into family settings, specifically supporting home-based activities. Through interviews and co-design sessions, we designed and developed a robotic system informed by both parents and children, that supported, among other interactions, family communication about school topics. We evaluated the robot in a week-long, in-home study with 10 families. Our findings show how families integrated the robot into daily life, how parental facilitation styles shaped use, and how families perceived both the helpfulness and challenges of the robot. We contribute empirical insights, a modular system, and design implications for family- and child-robot interactions. We discuss ethical and privacy considerations, and broaden the design space for technologies supporting family-school partnerships.

Problem

• family-school partnerships
• parental engagement
• home-based activities
• communication barriers
• child development

Innovation

• social robot
• family-school partnerships
• home-based activities
• co-design
• child-robot interaction