Dive Summary:
- In what might have sounded like an April Fool's Day story, Nao, a robot teacher, is the latest "hire" at the Career and Technical Education Academy in Hutchinson, Kan.
- Though students in a computer programming class are so far mainly sending typed messages to Nao, which he then repeats, the robot's caretaker Steve Stacey says the robot can be programmed to do whatever they'd like and works as a pre-college introduction to advanced engineering.
- The school purchased the $21,000 robot with a grant from the Cargill Corporation and enrollment in its advanced computer programming has noticeably increased, but they aren't the only ones getting in on the ground floor with robotic teaching--Tokyo University purchased 30 robots from Nao's makers, Aldebaran Robotics, in 2010 as part of an experiment to program robotic lab assistants.
From the article:
... Nao was developed by the French startup company Aldebaran Robotics, which describes the robot as an autonomous and programmable humanoid. Aldebaran says Nao offers students interactive lessons; for example, rather than calculating the velocity of a hypothetical curve ball themselves, students can use Nao's help to apply the mathematical formula in a computer program. ...
