ROBOTS!

Robots are cool.

Even middle schoolers think so and they don't think anything is cool.

Last week, we had a visitor at John Burroughs Middle School (JBMS), from robots.education. He introduced the students of one of our seventh grade computer classes to his robotics program. The students were instantly engaged and wanted to know so much more. Over the forty-some minute presentation the students got to take turns coding the robot and making it move, do somersaults, speak, even sing 'Happy Birthday'. I have to admit, I was even mightily impressed with what this little guy could do.

iPal

At the San Jose conference, we met iPal, a larger robot who speaks several languages and uses artificial intelligence to understand it's environment. The iPal robot is about to go into mass production and it was fascinating to see what is happening in this ever changing field.

The robots that we will be purchasing for JBMS are not as large as iPal but just as cool. We'll be getting them from robots.education and we're very excited. The kids will learn how to code and then be able to teach (code) the robots to do different things.