Having had some classroom experience, the one thing that kids crave for more than anything else is attention. Between a piece of toy and you, the kid will choose you every time. Readers of this blog will know that I'm a massive Japanese-phile but this Japanese robot teacher thing is just silly.
Every child is different in terms of neurological make up, temperament and life rhythm, as such, teaching programs must be tailored to the individual. It's absolutely absurd, with the technology we currently have, to think that a robot can recognise the qualities of a kid and then adapt the teaching program accordingly.
I guess this invention opens up a debate of scalability of quality teaching. There are probably many many research out there (and please send it to me if you have it) on the direct and positive correlation of classroom size vs kids' development. While I recognizing that there are financial challenges of rolling out smaller class sizes in a scalable way, there's got to be better ways of teaching our children.
The design question shouldn't be about how do we create a teacher replacement. The design question should be, how do we reorganize our lives so we can spend more time with kids (our own or otherwise)?