Digital competencies are essential future learning, communication, and participation in our society. The early childhood education plan in Finland emphasizes supporting children's understanding of digitalization, encouraging the kindergarten to use digital tools to foster creativity, collaboration, and literacy. In our Human and AI Interaction hub we continue our research in child-robot interaction and aim to explore how socially assistive robots (SAR) can contribute to responsible and human-centric learning environments in Finland-Swedish early childhood education and beyond. We do this as a part of our project BARTEK which is a 3 year long cross-disciplinary project where researchers in the fields of early childhood education, behavioral science and engineering science work together to find responsible and useful technological deployments for early childhood education. Collaboration with experts in engineering and educational sciences aims to increase understanding of digital solutions in daycare settings, develop and test suitable solutions for early childhood education and evaluate the practical and educational application of these solutions. The research is human-centric and from the beginning of the project the field (educators and staff in kindergarten) are involved in the co-creation of possible deployments. The research focuses on child-robot interaction for both applied and theoretical knowledge, presenting findings in national and international contexts. Additionally, the project seeks to strengthen the early childhood education and to improve early childhood educators’ technological competencies.
This project aims to integrate digital tools into early childhood education, promoting a technologically adept future generation.

Keywords: early childhood education HRI learning robotics