On Wednesday the headteacher of Shoshi High School in Waseda, Fukushima Prefecture, welcomed Pepper, explaining that "the future for society includes robots."
A proud Pepper promised to do his best at the school, and confessed that he "never expected to be admitted to a human school."
Yesuke Komatsu, a teacher at the school, told Sputnik that the teachers decided to enroll a robot at their school in the hope that Pepper will help other pupils.
"To begin with we thought about how our schoolchildren would enjoy socializing with a robot. Pepper the robot has an artificial intellect and is able to communicate. He can become the students' friend, they can talk to each other, search for things on the internet together," Komatsu said.
By saving photographs Pepper is able to recognize faces, and can also remember names.
"When Pepper saves all the photographs of all the children, he will be able to call each of them by name," she explained.
As an English teacher, Komatsu believes the robot will be particularly useful to her pupils.
"Pepper could say some words, or read texts – which he does better than I do – and I think that would delight the pupils. But best of all would be if my pupils communicated with Pepper in English."
"We are a special school, where pupils can take part in distance study, and some of them find it hard to communicate. But these kinds of pupils will talk with a robot as they would with a person," she explained.
Komatsu said that having a robot in school is another useful step for a society already familiar with robots in many aspects of life.
"Robots are machines, and they are known to be widely used in factories or to carry out particular tasks, but socializing with them is still difficult. We are trying to give our students the chance of communicating with a robot," Komatsu said.
