This study stems from the shortage of adequately trained pre-school teachers in rural areas in South Africa and developing countries (Evans and Nthulana, 2018; Foley, 2010). As the collaboration of humans and intelligent machines on daily tasks becomes prevalent, the solution of digital-tutors in or out of classrooms is progressively researched (Ventura et al., 2018; Wellnhammer, Dolata, Steigler, and Schwabe, 2020). Recent technologies, such as chatbots and conversational agents can potentially address the challenge of digital tutor (Vogt et al., 2017). These frameworks, however, are not adequate for the use of preschoolers tutoring, where essential requirements entail minimal error rate in the child’s speech recognition (Shivakumar and Georgiou, 2020; Kennedy et al., 2017), whereas the recognition performance of current technologies deteriorates for small children speech (Bhardwaj et al., 2022). The technological challenges are aggravated by accessibility, affordability and sustainability issues. The lack of resources – both monetary and infrastructural – hinders the accessibility of these technologies to many South African children in rural areas. A digital tutor should therefore be strictly low-cost and portable.

Author: Vered Aharonson

Published in: Canada International Conference on Education, 2024

• Date of Conference: 23-25 July, 2024
• DOI: 10.20533/CICE.2024.0080
• Electronic ISBN: 978-1-913572-65-5
• Conference Location: Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada