How to Teach AI Programming for Elementary Students? – A Case Study of AI
        Conversation Robot Programming at UEC Programming School
                                     Hiromitsu Yamaguchi, Hirofumi Abe, Toshiyuki Shimazaki,
                                                 Kenzo Ozaki, Masayuki Numao
                                             Department of Communication Engineering and Informatics,
                                                    The University of Electro-Communications


                                     Abstract                                                           Comparison with AIML
     In order to increase the number of human resources with pro-                         When you execute the following code, if the result of voice
     gramming thinking, programming education has become in-                              recognition is ”Hello”, you will say ”Nice to meet you!” If
     dispensable from elementary school students in Japan as well.                        ”Goodbye”, say ”See you again!”
     To utilize communication robots for programming education
     Developed a scripting language for communication robots                              Listing 3: Description example
     that even beginners can program I actually used it in a pro-                          1   /speech-to-text
     gramming class.                                                                       2   /if/Hello/Nice to meet you!
                                                                                           3   /if/Goodbye/See you again!
                                Basic syntax
The script language developed this time supports speech                                      The code below describes the same process in AIML
recognition and speech synthesis. If you want to say some-                                (2001). AIML was developed by Carnegie Mellon Univer-
thing, write it in natural language without any special gram-                             sity. It is a world-renowned rule-based language for chat-
mar. Listing 1 is a example.                                                              bots.

                                                                                          Listing 4: AIML
Listing 1: Utterance example
                                                                                           1   <aiml>
 1     Hello.                                                                              2     <category>
 2     I am a robot. Nice to meet you.                                                     3       <pattern>Hello</pattern>
                                                                                           4       <template>Nice to meet you!</
   Code written in natural language is spoken in order from                                            template>
the top. Since it can be written in natural language, anyone                               5     </category>
who can input using the keyboard can write it. No special                                  6     <category>
                                                                                           7       <pattern>Goodbye</pattern>
programming knowledge is required.                                                         8       <template>See you again!</template>
   Listing 2 is an example of conditional branching. This                                  9     </category>
script says ”Hello” when the robot recognizes ”Greeting”                                  10   </aiml>
by voice. When he recognizes other words, he says, ”I see.”
Lines with ”/” at the beginning of the line are command
lines. The line with ”:” at the beginning becomes a label and                                Comparing the two in Listing 3 and Listing 4 It can be
can be specified as the transition destination of the goto or if                          seen that the script language devised this time can easily de-
command. Lines beginning with ”//” are comment lines.                                     scribe the same contents.
                                                                                             XML is a difficult grammar for beginners and elementary
Listing 2: Conditional branching example                                                  school students, and it is difficult to notice grammar mis-
                                                                                          takes. The script language used this time can be spoken in
 1 :LOOP                                                                                  natural language, Since the control syntax is also the mini-
 2 /speech-to-text
 3 /if/greeting/:GREETING
                                                                                          mum number of characters, I thought that it could be used
 4 I see.                                                                                 as a language for programming education.
 5 /goto/:LOOP
 6                                                                                                  Evaluation robot configuration
 7 :GREETING
                                                                                          Figure 1 shows a robot developed to evaluate this script lan-
 8 hello
 9 /goto/:LOOP                                                                            guage. The robot has a built-in Linux-based single board
___________________________________                                                       computer and A speaker, a microphone, a motor, a button
In T. Kido, K. Takadama (Eds.), Proceedings of the AAAI 2022 Spring Symposium             with LED, and a monitor are connected.
“How Fair is Fair? Achieving Wellbeing AI”, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California,
USA, March 21–23, 2022. Copyright © 2022 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted
under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).




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                                                                Listing 5: Loop example
                                                                1   :LOOP
                                                                2   Hello
                                                                3   /goto/:LOOP


                                                                Creating a presentation
                                                                Finally, the students actually developed a thematic presen-
                                                                tation program. You can make a robot give a presentation
                 Figure 1: Evaluation robot                     by creating a program. The theme of the presentation was
                                                                ”Thanks to my family, which I can’t usually say.” Listing 6
                                                                shows an example presentation script.
   The single board computer has a built-in web server and
The image specified in the script language can be displayed     Listing 6: Presentation example
via a web browser. Because the script language can also be      1   /image/title.png
edited via a web browser No special development environ-        2   Gratitude.
ment is required.                                               3   I’m Taro Yamada,
                                                                4   5th grade at Tokyo Elementary School.
  Example of use in programming classroom                       5   /image/slide1.png
                                                                6   Dad, mom, thank you for your hard work
Used as a teaching material in the summer course of the Uni-            every day.
versity of Electro-Communications programming class held
in August 2018. The target students were 50 students from          A presentation is made by arranging the combinations of
the 5th grade of elementary school to the 2nd grade of high     slide images and utterances in order. The image command is
school, and each class was held for 2 days, for a total of 4    a command to display a slide image on the screen.
days.
                                                                                         summary
Understanding the network                                       Some students in the programming class started touching the
The main theme of the first day was network learning. The       keyboard a few months ago, As a result, everyone was able
evaluation robot has built-in WiFi and can connect to the In-   to complete the presentation script.
ternet. Have students understand how TCP / IP, IP addresses        Understanding the network and basic control of program-
and ports work They learned to operate their robot remotely     ming The students enjoyed learning.
from their PC.                                                     Visual programming languages are often used in program-
   Because all the robots are connected to the same WiFi        ming classes for beginners and you think Text-based pro-
router Students who understand how IP addresses and ports       gramming languages aren’t for beginners. It was shown that
work Noticed that other people’s robots can also be oper-       it can be used for elementary school students by devising a
ated remotely they started to operate another student’s robot   script language.
remotely. The student noticed that his robot was being op-
erated remotely with others and changed a password on his                              Future tasks
robot.                                                          The reason for creating the script developed this time is the
   From this experience, students learned the importance of     sense of incongruity with the watching robot for the elderly.
security in networks.                                           A watching robot developed by your grandson is better than
                                                                being watched by an off-the-shelf robot. I think it will be a
Understanding control syntax                                    robot that is loved like a treasure.
                                                                   It is still difficult in reality for AI to automatically learn
On the second day, they developed a script that gives a theme   and perform various tasks. At present, it takes time and effort
and makes the presentation a robot.                             to create a rule-based mechanism. An easy-to-write scripting
  First of all, We told the students that the robot would       language will be needed to gain the power of many non-
speak when you typed Japanese characters into the editor.       engineers.
Students who understand that the robot speaks when enter-          Elementary school students develop a communication
ing a Japanese document. Then start trying what happens         robot for their summer vacation homework and you can see
when you enter a random sentence. They understood that          a service using robots in the town. We would like to expand
you can make the robot talk while having fun.                   the range of activities to build a richer and more enjoyable
  Next, I gave some simple control syntax that are label and    world.
goto command. Listing 5 shows the sample code.
  When this scenario is executed, the robot repeatedly says                             References
”Hello”. Students enjoyed the behavior of a broken robot        AIML Foundation. 2001. http://www.aiml.foundation/. Ac-
and understood loop control.                                    cessed: 2022-01-24.




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