Anara Sandygulova, Wafa Johal, Zhanel Zhexenova, Bolat Tleubayev, Aida Zhanatkyzy, Aizada Turarova, Zhansaule Telisheva, Anna Cohen-Miller, Thibault Asselborn, Pierre Dillenbourg
In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet raises challenges to training an entire population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system, an extension of the existing CoWriter system, aiming to implement an autonomous social robot that would assist children in the transition from the old Cyrillic alphabet to a new Latin alphabet. With the aim to investigate which learning strategy yields better learning gains, we conducted an experiment with 67 children, aged 8-11, who interacted with a robot in a CoWriting Kazakh learning scenario. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid NAO robot how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin or Cyrillic. We hypothesized that a scenario in which a child is asked to convert the word to Latin would be more effective than having the robot perform the conversion itself.