METMRS: A Modular Multi-Robot System for English Class

English is always an important second or foreign language in Asia countries such as Taiwan. However, elementary or secondary schools in Taiwan encounter the shortage of teachers especially in rural areas. With the maturity of IT technology, IT equipment like educational robots offers opportunity to reduce teachers' effort and even replace teachers. The evidence of applying robot-assisted language learning (RALL) in L2 class has been exhibited positive effectiveness. Nevertheless, RALL in class often supports single or single type of robot. Therefore, our present research was aimed to propose a modular English teaching multi-robot system (METMRS) that incorporates multiple heterogeneous robots in English class. Moreover, in order to ease teachers' effort on design of course content, METMRS provides an editing system and seven instruction modules. The teacher simply manipulates the proposed editor to create module, fill in instructional content, and configure the sequence of modules. After launching the modules, a NAO robot acts like a teachers and Zenbo Junior robots act like assistants are able to perform instructions in place of teachers in class. Therefore, the objective of this paper concentrates the elaboration of design of the proposed METMRS.