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About

Jan van der Meij is a researcher specializing in educational robotics, child-robot interaction, and computer-assisted learning. His work sits at the intersection of human-robot interaction and learning science, with a particular focus on how social robots can be meaningfully integrated into classroom environments to support children's inquiry-based learning. Van der Meij's most significant contributions center on long-term, real-world deployments of autonomous social robots in primary school settings — a methodologically ambitious approach that goes well beyond typical short-term laboratory studies. His most cited work (2020, 46 citations) examines a four-month unsupervised Robot-Extended Computer Assisted Learning (RE-CAL) deployment, offering rare ecological validity in the field. Complementing this, his research on praise and mindset (34 citations) demonstrates how a robot's verbal encouragement can meaningfully shape children's attitudes toward learning. His contributions to the EASEL Project helped advance frameworks for human-robot symbiotic interaction in educational contexts, and his design-oriented studies provide actionable guidance for developers building socially intelligent educational agents. Across his body of work, van der Meij has consistently championed child-centered design and longitudinal research methods, making him a distinctive voice in a field often dominated by short-term experiments. His work is essential reading for researchers and designers building the next generation of classroom learning technologies.