iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

On March 2, a tech journalist posted a video he pulled from a Jibo Owners Facebook Group. It was heartbreaking to watch the little “social robot” announce that his servers were about to be shut down and he would not function any longer. He even thanked his human owners for having him around before he did a little goodbye dance. Many people responded to this tweet emotionally: Less than a month earlier, multiple articles that sounded more like obituaries described …

A Japanese hotel has fired hundred of its robotic staff because they weren't doing a good job. The Henn-na “Strange” Hotel in Nagasaki Prefecture has laid off 243 robots after they started to cause more work for their human colleagues. 

One of the robots that got the ax was a doll-shaped assistant placed in each room called Churi. Churi was supposed to help guests plan their stay by answering questions about local attractions

Look back on the biggest moments in robotics in 2018, from the continued ascendance of SpotMini to the rapid rise and fall of the home robot.

You know it’s gonna be a great day in Mrs. Brown’s class when I’m almost more excited than my students! This week in second grade, we tested out Sphero’s brand new cutting edge Bolt robot, and I think we might be in love. I’ve long been a fan of Sphero’s innovation and robotics philosopies. Sphero Founder and Chief Software Architect Adam Wilson recently stated, “In today’s tech-focused, hyper-changing world, STEAM education is more important than ever. But there is a crucial element missing in most curriculum – the fun. That’s where we come in. But we’re also more than that – we engage kids in meaningful journeys. We afford them the chance to create, to consider, to challenge. In short, we use coding to help kids decode lifelong skills and lessons.”

“Are you ready to read?” the little robot asks the boy. The robot’s name is Minnie, and it’s designed to turn reading alone at home into a group activity. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison just published a small study suggesting that having Minnie around helped kids get into reading—and get more out of it.

"Every year, Time magazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convinced their product deserves to be included in Time’s “25 Best Inventions” list. This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot named Jibo.

Jibo — a so-called “social robot” — is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they’re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile.

And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture."

If robots are ever going to earn their keep, they'll need to learn on the job. Factory supervisors have better things to do than program complex instructions, so what if they could just show robots what to do, the same way they would a new human worker? AI researchers from Nvidia have now demonstrated a system that lets robots do just that, learning how to perform a specific task by watching someone do it just once.

"There have been complaints leveraged against out of the box robots like Dash and Dot, Ozobot, Hummingbird, Sphero. The complaints usually revolve around the canned and prescriptive nature of their uses and programs, that they lack creative engagement by the younger users. I personally love the excitement my learners have using these robots. As with all tools and technologies and with creative framing, though, they can be used in creative and imaginative ways.

"Mention robots to many English teachers and they’ll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there’s a robot at all, it’s located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It’s not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills. (How Robots in English Class Can Spark Empathy and Improve Writing)"

This past term, I had my 2nd through 4th grade students work on their robot-enhanced creative writing and stories. In small groups, students were asked to create a fictional storyline and use StoryboardThat.com to create both the physical scenes and the accompanying narrative. As part of their directions, they were told that they were going to create a 3D setting out of cardboard boxes, foam board, LED lights, and other craft materials; and that they would use Wonder’s Dot with the Blocky App and Ozobot as the characters in their stories. Preparation time was divided between storyboarding, creating the scene, and learning how to use/code the robots. Because of all of the preparation and practice, the recording actually went quite quick and smoothly.

Here is a break down of the learning events that learners were asked to complete:"

Robotics provides students with hands-on opportunities to write code and see immediately the outcome. It provides a context for inquiry and discovery, to become active problem solvers and to engage in their own learning. If students are given the time, space and purpose to tinker with robots and solve open ended problems, it will allow for thought and action to come together, and the opportunity for students to construct knowledge and build theories in individual and collaborative settings. These are critical practices for learning and discovery that have application across all curriculum areas.

Flippy the robot has been asked to temporarily step aside while his management team can re-train his co-workers to help him become more efficient.

There are advantages to sleeping with a robot. For one thing, it won’t kick you in the middle of the night.

It will obediently snuggle with you till you’ve had your fill. When you need your space, simply throw it to other side of the bed–with no hurt feelings. At any point, you can control the robot’s body. Is his breathing too strong? His talk too loud? All can be adjusted with a simple dial.

The best part? It doesn’t snore.

Meet the Somnox sleep robot, a football-sized companion made to help relax you to sleep. The soft-to-touch bot murmurs with a slowed breathing rhythm, subconsciously lulling users to a meditative breathing speed. It comes with integrated audio with Enya-eqsue celestial sounds and white noise, but if that’s not your bag, you can upload whatever calming audio you’d like, be it lullabies, bird sounds, or Jeff Goldblum’s voice.

According to an Oxford University analysis, close to half of all jobs will be taken over by robots in the next 25 years. No wonder the press is full of handwringing about how workers will adjust and the best way to prepare the next generation for this A.I.-filled future.

But not everyone is alarmed about the prospect of radical change in the labor market. After all, this has happened before (for instance, when mechanization replaced the vast majority of farmers) and it turned out OK. Plus, a lot of today's jobs are soul-crushingly boring and repetitive. Losing them just might be a blessing. 

Among these optimists are IT service company Cognizant. In a recent report (hat tip to Business Insider for the pointer), the consultancy notes that while creative destruction has always been with us, so has reinvention. Sure, robots will take jobs away, but they'll also create new ones.

What will these new gigs look like exactly? The report imagines detailed job ads for 21 future careers that Cognizant thinks may emerge in the next 10 years.

This year has been quite spectacular for tech developments, but some seriously creepy robots that are alarmingly sophisticated and human-like have also been unveiled.

"Robotics has changed the world and will continue to do so over the coming decades. The dystopian fears and views of robotics have become a major staple in pop culture, showing up in major film franchises, comics, books etc. With the equal rise and interest in artificial intelligence, there are shared concerns even among some of the world’s leading experts that society could be playing with fire.

Nevertheless most of the technology that will come from this “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will be more disruptive than destructive and more helpful than harmful. Robots are already here and more prevalent in our daily lives than you may think.

Delivering packages, assembly cars, providing “customer service”, traveling through space, providing security, and cleaning up cities. Robots are reshaping the way humans tackle daily tasks. From your living room to the race track robots have invaded our world."

Robot Day is a day where kids and young professionals can learn about robots via a presentation and play time with actual robots after. The idea for Robot Day came from when Irvin was boothing for OC IEEE Young Professionals with his STEM Ferris Wheel toy at an IVC science fair and a ton of parents kept asking where he got it from, how much it cost and where to get it themselves…this interest in STEM toys from families got Irvin thinking that a whole session dedicated to these toys, combined with professional engineers, would be a great way to raise awareness of STEM within the local community!

Mention robots to many English teachers and they’ll immediately point down the hall to the science classroom or to the makerspace, if they have one. At many schools, if there’s a robot at all, it’s located in a science or math classroom or is being built by an after-school robotics club. It’s not usually a fixture in English classrooms. But as teachers continue to work at finding new entry points to old material for their students, robots are proving to be a great interdisciplinary tool that builds collaboration and literacy skills.

“For someone like me who teaches literature by lots of dead white guys, teaching programming adds relevance to my class,” said Jessica Herring, a high school English teacher at Benton High School in Arkansas. Herring first experimented using Sphero, essentially a programmable ball, when her American literature class was studying the writing of early settlers. Herring pushed the desks back and drew a maze on the floor with tape representing the journey from Europe to the New World. Her students used class iPads and an introductory manually guided app to steer their Spheros through the maze.

"Whether you're excited about it or not, robots and artificial intelligence are an inevitable part of a future that we're fast approaching. Thanks to books and films littered with rogue A.I.s and malevolent robots, some people are understandably a bit frightened by the prospect of a world overrun by such technologies.

They're not alone, as many experts across fields as diverse as technology and economics are also expressing their fears over the rise of the robots. While these fears are certainly valid, it's important to note that these concerns are being voiced in the hopes that technology can be improved, not prohibited.

Here are just some of the pressing concerns regarding robots and A.I.s that experts want to see addressed before the new era of technology commences."

The following is an excerpt from GigaOm publisher Byron Reese’s new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity. You can purchase the book here.

The Fourth Age explores the implications of automation and AI on humanity, and has been described by Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as framing “the deepest questions of our time in clear language that invites the reader to make their own choices. Using 100,000 years of human history as his guide, he explores the issues around artificial general intelligence, robots, consciousness, automation, the end of work, abundance, and immortality.”


One of those deep questions of our time:

When the topic of automation and AI comes up, one of the chief concerns is always technology’s potential impact on jobs. Many fear that with the introduction of wide-scale automation, there will be no more jobs left for humans. But is it really that dire? In this excerpt from The Fourth Age, Byron Reese considers if there are jobs that will never be automated.

Coding or programming is the language used to talk to computers. It really is the 21st Century language being introduced into our schools’ curriculum through the Digital Technologies curriculum. In the junior school coding can be so much fun as robots can be used to program and carry out instructions. This can be so rewarding for young students to engage with code and seeing the impact their code has.

In this post (2 of 3), I thought I’d share some of my favourite robots which are available to suit students in Years 3 & 4.

In 50 Walmarts around the country, robots are assisting human workers. While employees seem to love ther new assistants, customers remain mostly indifferent to their presence.