Kids can learn from robots--with a lot of help from humans

Could robots be part of the answer to alleviating teacher shortages (and other staffing issues) in the future? Lots of folks think so, and new research indicates kids might already be primed to accept a non-human information source. A group of researchers from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, ran two experiments with groups of three- and five-year-old children, all recruited from a database of existing research participants. Families received gift cards and the children received certificates of merit for participating. Approximately half the sample was white, a quarter of the sample was mixed race, and the remainder consisted of various other ethnic groups (such as African, Asian, and South American).