The Robotic Construction Kit as a Tool for Cognitive Stimulation in Children and Adolescents: The RE4BES Protocol

Abstract

Through numerous experiences, the robotics has been demonstrated to have good potential in the field of strengthening social skills in children with Special Educational Needs and in particular with autism spectrum disorder. There are still not many experimental studies on the cognitive enhancement and social skills of children with special needs conducted with robotics construction kits that, requiring both the construction of the robot body and the programming of its “mind“, bring into play a multiplicity of cognitive and social skills. For the aforementioned reasons our team from the University of Palermo and from the Center MetaIntelligenze ONLUS developed the treatment protocol RE4BES, which is a collection of guidelines for realizing robotics personalized activities for children with special needs. In this paper, two studies will be described concerning the first application of activities drawn from the RE4BES protocol. The first study concerns the use of the robotic construction kits for the stimulation of visuo-spatial abilities; in the second study the robot construction kits have been used to stimulate the attentional abilities in a child with severe difficulties on focused attention tasks.