A spokesman for the Ministry of Education confirmed that the pilot project will be conducted in 500 schools as of the beginning of the next school year, in April 2019, for a budget of about 250 million yen (about 200 000 euros).
"The robots that are already on the market have several functions, for example, they can check the pronunciation of each student," he said.
This method may not seem very relevant, but schools in the archipelago struggle to find competent English teachers and do not have enough money to recruit assistants dedicated to this subject.
The representative of the ministry added that "there are other planned methods", such as the use of tablets or the implementation of online lessons with human professors, whose mother tongue is English.
Some Japanese schools have already taken the lead and recruited robots, in anticipation of the implementation of new rules in 2020 making mandatory to teach English from the age of 10, against 12 years today.