RobotErzählen – Storytelling with a Social Robot in Primary Schools

Storytelling is an evidence-based method for supporting children's language development, but teachers rarely have the time to give every child enough opportunities to speak. RobotErzählen addresses this by bringing a social robot into primary school classrooms as a storytelling partner that supports, rather than replaces, the teacher.

The project (11/2025 – 02/2029) is funded by the aim Akademie Heilbronn and is a collaboration between KIT, LMU Munich and the aim Akademie Heilbronn, carried out with two primary schools in Heilbronn as part of the CoTransform initiative. LMU develops the didactic concept and studies child–robot interaction in a qualitative longitudinal study; aim coordinates the school partnership. Teachers and researchers co-design the robot's behaviour in a participatory process.

At KIT, we develop the robot's conversational and expressive capabilities. Starting from the Navel social robot, originally designed for elderly care, we are building dedicated storytelling software for children aged 6–10. The system combines automatic speech recognition, a large language model and speech synthesis, running on GDPR-compliant server infrastructure. Our research focuses on three questions: how the robot can understand and adapt to children's language level, how it can prompt individual children and small groups to tell their own stories, and how it can become an engaging storyteller itself.

Following an exploratory phase in the 2025/26 school year, the main study with the new software begins in 2026/27. The project has received approval by the KIT Ethics Committee via decision 1521.

KIT team: Prof. Dr. Barbara Bruno, Katharina Biernacka, Vincent Pfäfflin

Contact: Katharina Biernacka
Project page: aim-akademie.org/roboterzaehlen