PATHWiSE Teacher Tool
With funding from NSF Award #2202802, the Personalized Augmenting Tool for Homework in Science Education (PATHWiSE) is designed to empower teachers with the ability to efficiently design customized robot assisted homework experiences for their students. Teachers will be able to create embedded comments for the robots to say to students while learning at home that can to tailored the specific learning needs of that student. Teachers will be guided through a process of creating knowledge and interest supports for their existing reading assignments and curating which students get what supports. Then students working with the STEMMate robot will receive these custom augmented assignments through interactions with the robot.
This work builds off our prior NSF funded work with the STEMMate robot to include teachers in the design process for creating in-home learning experiences. In Phase 1 we worked with teachers and students to design the augmentation tool and robot interactions and then built the PATHWiSE prototype to test in real classrooms. We are currently conducting a pilot in a classroom near Chicago and plan a large scale field trial in collaboration with classrooms from the Chicago and Madison area in 2025.
In our current prototype of PATHWiSE, teachers can add their own comments (A) or choose from suggested comments (B). Our latest addition provides optional AI-Generated comments that are created through GPT prompts using teacher highlighted text. When the teacher clicks the refresh button (D) the system will add several AI-Generated comment options (E) to left panel. Teachers simply drag and drop a comment bubble from the left panel onto the canvas (F) to create a comment and add or edit text on the right panel (G). They can then preview audio of the text (H) and select and add emotional
display to accompany the text (I). The PATHWiSE system then translates the comments into trigger-action
pairs, used to initiate robot speech and emotional expressions during reading sessions (right)
