Our current smart society, where problems and frictions are smoothed out with smart, often invisible technology like AI and smart sensors, calls for designers who unravel and open the smart fabric. Societies are not malleable, and moreover, a smooth society without rough edges is neither desirable nor livable. In this paper we argue for designing friction to enhance a more nuanced debate of smart cities in which conflicting values are better expressed. Based on our experiences with the Moral Design Game, an adversarial design activity, we came to understand the value of creating tangible vessels to highlight conflict and dipartite feelings surrounding smart cities.
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BackgroundEarly Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers at urban preschools are potential key figures to promote healthy behaviours in disadvantaged young children and to engage parents in lifestyle-related topics. An ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding healthy behaviours may support parents and stimulate their children’s development. However, it is not an easy task to establish such a collaboration and ECEC teachers need tools to communicate with parents about lifestyle-related topics. This paper describes the study protocol of a preschool-based intervention (CO-HEALTHY) to promote an ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding healthy eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours in young children.MethodsA cluster randomised controlled trial will be performed at preschools in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Preschools will be randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. The intervention consists of a toolkit with 10 parent-child activities and associated training for ECEC teachers. The activities were composed using the Intervention Mapping protocol. At intervention preschools, ECEC teachers will carry out the activities during standard contact moments. Parents will receive associated intervention materials and will be encouraged to perform similar parent-child activities at home. At control preschools, the toolkit and training will not be implemented. The primary outcome will be the teacher- and parent-reported partnership regarding healthy eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours in young children. The perceived partnership will be assessed by a questionnaire at baseline and at 6 months. In addition, short interviews with ECEC teachers will be held. Secondary outcomes include the knowledge, attitude, food- and activity-related practices of ECEC teachers and parents. Furthermore, children’s eating, physical (in)activity and sleeping behaviours, and weight development will be assessed. A process evaluation of the intervention will be made.DiscussionThe intervention aims to provide a practical tool for ECEC teachers at urban preschools to promote an ECEC teacher-parent partnership regarding a healthy lifestyle in young children.Trial registrationNetherlands Trial Register (NTR): NL8883. Date registered: September 8, 2020.
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Maintaining the child-robot relationship after a significant break, such as a holiday, is an important step for developing sustainable social robots for education. We ran a four-session user study (n = 113 children) that included a nine-month break between the third and fourth session. During the study, participants practiced math with the help of a social robot math tutor. We found that social personalization is an effective strategy to better sustain the child-robot relationship than the absence of social personalization. To become reacquainted after the long break, the robot summarizes a few pieces of information it had stored about the child. This gives children a feeling of being remembered, which is a key contributor to the effectiveness of social personalization. Enabling the robot to refer to information previously shared by the child is another key contributor to social personalization. Conditional for its effectiveness, however, is that children notice these memory references. Finally, although we found that children's interest in the tutoring content is related to relationship formation, personalizing the topics did not lead to more interest in the content. It seems likely that not all of the memory information that was used to personalize the content was up-to-date or socially relevant.
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