Excerpt from a story at EETimes.com:
A new academic group at Georgia Institute of Technology will design personal robots for use in education, claiming that robotics is about to enter the equivalent of the PC era in computing. The effort is partly motivated by a desire to address a nationwide downturn in computer science enrollment.
The Institute for Personal Robotics in Education (IPRE) is working on a small wheeled robot and a robotic arm with a video camera to pump up interest in its entry-level computer science courses. It also plans to design robots for use in secondary, and maybe even primary schools.
"We want to bring robots into computer science courses to make them more exciting and effective," said Tucker Balch, an associated professor at Georgia Tech and the director of IPRE. "Computer science enrollment is generally declining. After the dotcom bust it seems computer science is not cool anymore," he said.
Link: EETimes.com - Georgia Tech preps personal robots for computer science students, via ACM Technews.
Computer science was once cool?
But don't get your hopes up for a friendly ASIMO buddy. Judging from the IPRE site, they're aiming for something a little more mundane. From the FAQ:
Q: Will the robots teach the course?
A: No-- People will teach the course. The robots are a tool for teaching, to help make core CS concepts easier to understand.
At the project's blog they emphasize that they don't just want to teach robotics; they want to teach computer science using robots as a general tool. It's an interesting idea for computer science, but to go beyond that (to primary school, for example) sounds a lot like LOGO/Papert territory, which I have doubts about.
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