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Beyond Coding: Back to the Future with Education Robots

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Abstract

Jeannette Wing’s 2013 call for education to make coding a key skill coincided with a boom in new education robots. Not surprisingly most of these new robots focus on developing student’s computational thinking abilities and programming know-how. Is that all robots can offer? To find the answer I’ll explore the history of education robots: specifically the ideas of Seymour Papert. What we’ll find is something with far more potential than providing learners with a way of developing their coding skills. And against accepted wisdom, I’ll suggest that as technology develops the need for coders will (in the long term) dwindle but the power of robots to help educate children for the future will increase.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Strictly speaking this applies not just to England, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also followed similar polices.

  2. 2.

    Now more popularly known as the maker movement

  3. 3.

    GVA – it is a measure of total output and income in the economy.

  4. 4.

    Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt, professors at MIT, with Bolt’s former student Robert Newman. People who worked there in the 1960s and 70s told me it was difficult to know who worked for BBN and who for MIT.

  5. 5.

    I constructed this history from interviews and discussions with Solomon, Feurzeig and Paul Wexelblat and email correspondence with Marvin Minsky, Danny Bobrow and Mike Paterson. Some say Papert co-invented Logo and the Turtle – this wasn’t the view of those I interviewed. The Children’s Machine reference is Papert’s explanation of his Eureka moment in Cyprus – the moment he invented Logo.

  6. 6.

    I base this on the findings in the Blombos Caves in Papert’s native South Africa.

  7. 7.

    Grey Walter made robots Elmer and Elsie between 1947 and 1948. He called them tortoises, because of their shapes. Tortoise got translated from British English to the American Turtle. Grey Walter’s work inspired Papert to use the name Turtle, but Grey Walter’s robots had nothing to do with education. He made them as part of his studies in neuroscience – not education. Similarly, Braitenberg created his famous robots to explore neuroscience.

  8. 8.

    You can make a Turtle robot (taxonomy – User Bot: Turtle) from Lego. This doesn’t make Lego a User Bot. The classification rule, the higher classification determines the choice. That is, Lego is first and foremost a Build Bot. Think of a platypus, which is a mammal despite its many reptile characteristics.

  9. 9.

    Taxonomy – Social Robot: human-like

  10. 10.

    Taxonomy – Social Robot: telepresence

  11. 11.

    Taxonomy – Social Robot: humanoid

  12. 12.

    A test of machine intelligence. If a human can’t distinguish the machine from another human by the replies to questions put to both, the machine is intelligent.

  13. 13.

    Crew Interactive Mobile Companion

  14. 14.

    Taxonomy – User Bot: Turtle

  15. 15.

    Taxonomy – Build Bot: Build system; modular parts

  16. 16.

    Characteristic tag: Block-based program

  17. 17.

    Taxonomy – User Bot: Turtle

  18. 18.

    I reviewed a paper for the same conference. It focussed on using Lego and exploring poetry and it got the same sort of response from one of the other reviewers.

  19. 19.

    The children who chose the stone and toothbrush were happy to play with the robot, but had specific interest in finding out how the toothbrush worked and writing a story about a magic stone.

  20. 20.

    Office for Standards in Education – a government quango who inspect and report on school performance

  21. 21.

    The ‘ERA intelligence and interaction principle’ predict we’ll develop more natural interactions with robots.

  22. 22.

    West Coast Native American used ocean-going canoes to travel up and down the US Pacific Coast. Celebrating this tradition is now an annual adult-only event. Native Americans revived potlatch festivals (banned in the nineteenth century) which traditionally brought tribes together to share wealth, news, food, music and dance.

  23. 23.

    Children attend the summer camp voluntarily and those involved were of all ages and abilities.

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Correspondence to Dave Catlin .

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Catlin, D. (2019). Beyond Coding: Back to the Future with Education Robots. In: Daniela, L. (eds) Smart Learning with Educational Robotics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19913-5_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19913-5_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19912-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19913-5

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