My classroom, the Aqua Room, is 'crushing' robots this year. Every day a child talks about Curiosity on Mars. Every day we watch the Boston Dynamics robots. Back in December we wrote a giant letter to NASA, and to the robots at Boston Dynamics.
NASA did not reply, but late in January I received an email from Boston Dynamics asking if their engineers could video with the children. YES! What a wonderful event.
Emily, Adam, and Radhika were terrific. They showed videos of the robots, answered questions, and told us about the new robots.
Atlas is cool, so is Spot. Handle is no longer made because he did not balance well on wheels. He has been replaced by Stretch. The video chat was a wonderful give-and-take of children asking questions, and the engineers asking questions. Here is what we learned:
Stretch uses vacuum suction to pick up heavy objects.
Cameras are on the robots.
Spot is beginning to learn to draw, using markers.
Robots cannot pick us up because they are too strong and might hurt us.
'D' jobs are the dirty, dull, dangerous jobs.
The engineers asked the children, "What would you like the robots to learn how to do next?"
Make dinner, play with more toys, dance with more songs.
The engineers smiled and nodded. They cared. They know they're inspiring future Roboticists. We had a final dance with robots.
Of course we thanked them.
A few weeks later a card arrived in the mail, an answer to our original letter back in December.
We checked out the AI Institute, TikTok, and two Spots dancing the Tango. The card included Spot and Atlas stickers for the children.
This weekend was our school's annual Open House for prospective families to visit. I was trying to explain to a parent who was asking about curriculum ("Do you have planned learning and themes?") how we plan...but often the interests of the children take a different path. I said, "If we follow the interests of the children, then the greatest learning takes place." I then gave her the example of Robots.
Imagine if I stuck to my lesson plans this year and did not, or could not, include robots. No, I can't imagine.
I then told the parent the story of Andrew, early on in my teaching. I was a good teacher, planned carefully, loved children- all the right stuff. Andrew was a child I hadn't really connected with. Every teacher has children like that, right? At rest time everyone had fallen asleep except Andrew. We both looked across the room at each other and smiled. There was nobody else in the whole wide world. It was a deep moment. It changed my teaching forever, and everything I did became child-centered. That was the start of being a real teacher.
The parent understood. She could see that learning works if teachers pay attention to children. I added, "Of course the recipe has gallons of love and laughter thrown in." We both laughed.
Cheers to Robots!
Jennie
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