"You've got a friend in me": Co-Designing a Peer Social Robot for Young Newcomers' Language and Cultural Learning

Abstract

Community literacy programs supporting young newcomer children in Canada face limited staffing and scarce one-to-one time, which constrains personalized English and cultural learning support. This paper reports on a co-design study with United for Literacy tutors that informed Maple, a table-top, peer-like Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) designed as a practice partner within tutor-mediated sessions. From shadowing and co-design interviews, we derived newcomer-specific requirements and added them in an integrated prototype that uses short story-based activities, multi-modal scaffolding and embedded quizzes that support attention while producing tutor-actionable formative signals. We contribute system design implications for tutor-in-the-loop SARs supporting language socialization in community settings and outline directions for child-centered evaluation in authentic programs.