It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon at the Cranleigh Abu Dhabi school, and pupils in Reception are practising their handwriting.

Some are drawing character shapes in the sand, others are being given one-to-one help from their teacher or teaching assistant, and a couple are being guided by artificial intelligence in the form of a robot arm. An arm that is essentially an automated handwriting teacher.

The device guides the children to form character shapes, provides visual feedback, sends vibrations through a stylus (pen), and has the ability to – if pupils stray from the right handwriting path – physically move their hand back to where it should be.

“The idea came when I was watching some teachers helping children learn how to handwrite,” says Mohamad Eid, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi, who developed the technology. “They were sometimes using a technique where they were holding the hand of the child and physically guiding them how to handwrite, so I thought why not develop a robotic arm device that can do this and help the children learn how to construct handwriting skills?”

The device, which is called Moalem (taken from the Arabic word for "teacher") is still in the trial stages of development. The pupils at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi are among the first in the world to use it.

How does Moalem work?

The robotic arm is equipped with motors that can produce movements. The child grasps the attached pen and the arm then applies the "appropriate movements" to physically guide the learner to correctly make the shapes of letters, just as a teacher would. The child is guided to write on a screen, which displays their work (imagine a digital piece of paper).

The device also has built-in auditory feedback. As the children are learning the shape of a particular letter, a voice tells them how to pronounce that letter.

So the process allows children to engage with visual, haptic and auditory learning. But as all teachers know, each child learns at a different pace and needs a different level of support. Can a machine really factor in these differences and tailor the approach to each child?

Eid believes so. He has designed the device to support three different ways of physically guiding pupils. The first is "full haptic guidance": the learner grasps the pen and passively follows the movement without contributing any physical interaction themselves. 

The second is "partial guidance", in which the learner holds on to the pen, but moves it around by themselves to form the characters. The device monitors the difference between the handwriting the child is forming and the "reference" handwriting, which is the desired trajectory. Only in the event of significant errors does the arm engage to physically put the child’s hand back on the right track.

And the third is called "disturbance haptic guidance". This is the full haptic guidance, but with an added bonus: a vibration. Every now and then, the pen vibrates to make sure the pupil is paying full attention – these vibrations can be set so that they happen at particularly important points.

This last level was added after Eid and his research team found that because the full guidance wasn’t interactive, pupils tended to lose focus and weren’t fully aware of the shapes they were forming.

Teachers' worst nightmare?

So far, this all sounds very positive. But where does the teacher fit into this scene, you might be wondering. Does the robotic arm render them superfluous when teaching pupils to write?

In a technical sense, no. “As the children are completing the guidance, the device records all the movements they make. Teachers can then evaluate the quality of the handwriting, look for any repeating errors and then adapt the guidance,” says Eid.

Arguably, this part of the process wouldn’t need to be completed by a teacher. It could be completed by anyone who could analyse the data and choose the appropriate robotic guidance programme. So for teachers who are already nervous about a future in which they could be replaced with technology, might Moalem be their worst nightmare?

Tania Moonesinghe, the head of pre-prep at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi, thinks teachers have nothing to worry about. She has been heavily involved in the trial of the robot arm and is adamant that the technology shouldn’t be used to replace teachers, but should instead be a tool to support what they already do. 

“We were very excited to be part of something that’s at the leading edge in education and incorporate it into something that we already do," explains Moonesinghe. "We don’t see it as something that’s going to replace what a teacher traditionally does with handwriting, but more of an additional tool that we can use to enhance what we’re already working on.” 

In many ways, the arm will not change how handwriting is taught, argues Moonesinghe. She says that in most lessons, a teacher demonstrates how to form a letter and children then practise that letter in a variety of ways – including tracing figures in sand or writing them on sandpaper. The robotic arm simply becomes another way the child can practise forming the shapes.

“It’s always a challenge for teachers to support individual children because, basically, you’ve got to do it in a one-to-one situation to have a real impact. What would be exciting would be if we got to a point where a classroom had a bank of these types of haptic devices, because they do provide a means where individual children get individual feedback," says Moonesinghe. “The software can adapt as the children’s handwriting adapts, so that’s something that enhances what we already do rather than completely replaces it.”

Higher levels of engagement

At the time of writing, a group aged 5-7 had been using the technology for just over a week, and were already asking their teachers how the arms were made and where they (or their parents) could buy one. 

The children use the devices for 10 minutes a day, three times a week.

“In the same way that if you’re doing handwriting in a classroom, it’s better to do it little and often rather than one long session a week. It’s very early days, but the children are already displaying higher levels of engagement and enjoying using the devices more and more,” says Moonesinghe.

Moalem is still in the trial stages, so is not yet available in the UK, but if a school, or indeed a parent, wanted to buy one (or a whole bank of them), it would set them back $300 per device (about £220). For that, you’d get everything bar a laptop: the screen, the arm and the stylus. 

“When we started designing the technology we thought about making this available not only for schools but also for families. We thought that if parents could afford to buy it at home, the child could practise in her own time and that’s why we set a target for the technology that the whole set-up shouldn’t cost more than $300 or 1,000 dirhams,” says Eid.

Now that the pupils at Cranleigh Abu Dhabi are making the most of the robotic arm, and the teachers are happily co-teaching alongside it, Eid has big plans for the technology.

“When we started building the technology we had in mind that we would love to see this technology deployed in schools around the world, for all children to use as a tool to help them, particularly for those who are haptic learners,“ he says.

So would you welcome this technology into your classroom? And would you be happy for it to teach your pupils how to write? Whatever teachers' feelings about them, it seems that the robot arms are coming, so the profession had better get ready for them.