Omer Gvirsman

Teaching toddlers a second language with a social robot

The first years of children’s lives are the optimal ages for acquiring a second language. As parents, we want to help our children learn this important ability, but, as most of us haven’t received pedagogical professional training, we might not know how we should act.

In this project we developed a robot for toddler-parent-robot interaction for teaching a second language. For the children, the robot is a playful puppet to play games with. For parents, it fills their need for a pedagogical guide, providing the suitable learning content and creating shared activities.

Our aim is to effectively introduce robots into our homes while building on and promoting the social and emotional connections between parents and their children.

Omer Gvirsman

Omer is a PhD candidate at Dr. Goren Gordon’s Curiosity lab in the department of industrial engineering at the Tel-Aviv University. He holds a BSc and MSc in mechanical engineering, both from Tel-Aviv university. He also worked as a mechanical designer, creating consumer products and heavy machinery, and is the co-founder of Curiosity Robotics, a company which aims to teach toddlers a second language with a playful robot. Omer is interested in using robotics to augment humans, in making the physical world smart, and in promoting playfulness with technology.