HARRy

17 July 2026

An Assistive Affective Maths Robot for primary school children

Children’s maths performance is declining. At the same time, the shortage of primary school teachers is increasing. The teaching time available is spent on the cognitive aspects of maths: ensuring that children understand and master the basic skills. But maths is a subject in which negative emotions also play a significant role – more so than in other subjects. And those emotions can have a negative impact on maths performance.

Although teachers agree that emotional aspects are important, they lack the time, knowledge, skills and appropriate tools to address these systematically. This gave rise to the idea of developing a robot assistant for teachers that takes children’s emotions towards maths into account. Based on brief, child-friendly micro-check-ins, the robot can deploy appropriate emotion-regulation strategies where necessary. In this way, both the cognitive and affective aspects of maths can be addressed, without placing additional time pressure on teachers.