"Can I Take My Robot Home with Me"?

Robotics courses in schools have been offered now for many years. We'll get into the engineering/coding world of robotics soon. But first let's approach robots from a different lens—through imagination. Seymour Papert was a revolutionary in the educational world of computers and coding. In his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (published in 1980!), he borrows the term syntonic from the field of clinical psychology to describe the kinds of experiences we should foster with students using technologies. Syntonic is when people are responsive to and in harmony with their environments. Recently I've been using this term with teachers in thinking about designing curriculums. When I wrote about creating Imaginary Friends, I pulled from my children's actual lived experiences and the toys they naturally play with at home. Here, again, we are looking at designing experiences with robots from my son's (and I hope other children's) fascination with them.

The Learning Alliance in Vero Beach, FL has a series of summer programs for kids called Moonshot Academies. Functioning outside of the typical school-day, the goal of these spaces is to serve as laboratories for experimenting with ways of developing literacy. The Learning Alliance asked me to come work with their team, Debbi Arseneaux and Fran McDonough, to create two professional development workshops that would inspire teachers as they thought about shaping the academies for the summer. When I first spoke on the phone with Debbi and Fran, I told them about my son's fascination with robots and we wondered if we could dream up a way to bring the literacy, arts, and engineering together in a syntonic experience for 5-8 year old.

Debbi, Fran, and I with newly built robots.

Artificial Intelligence

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my three-year-old son became fascinated with robots and I began to pay more attention to the role of robots in our lives. All of the leading technology companies host annual developers conferences where they discuss the future vision for new technologies they are researching. At the Facebook conference, Mark Zuckerberg explained that in ten years Facebook's three primary areas of interest will be augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and connectivity. He and his team then laid out technologies where, in myriad ways, our intelligence will be blended with artificial intelligence (Pokemon on the phone is an early example of this augmented reality—digital creatures in your camera appear in your real environment).

In May 2017 Google noted a similar shift moving from a focus on mobile devices to artificial intelligence.

And just this week Apple joined the fray.

New York Times writer Thomas Friedman in his book Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations looks at how jobs in our world are changing and what job opportunities will be available in the future. He describes the concept of intelligent assistance as,

we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter.

A key example Friedman gives is from farming. When we imagine milking a cow we might have a quaint image of a person seated on a stool with a bucket. A New York Times article he quotes from 2014 tells a different story.

Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves. Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers … Robots allow the cows to set their own hours, lining up for automated milking five or six times a day— turning the predawn and late-afternoon sessions around which dairy farmers long built their lives into a thing of the past. With transponders around their necks, the cows get individualized service. Lasers scan and map their underbellies, and a computer charts each animal’s “milking speed,” a critical factor in a 24-hour-a-day operation. The robots also monitor the amount and quality of milk produced, the frequency of visits to the machine, how much each cow has eaten, and even the number of steps each cow has taken per day, which can indicate when she is in heat.

In the future almost every job will require workers to interact seamlessly and fluidly with artificial intelligences. Exploring robots from various perspectives in the classroom is the perfect opportunity to create a syntonic experience for children that connects their natural fascination with robots to the kinds of technological shifts we are seeing in the larger society.

Big Ideas, Essential Questions, and Texts

When we design experiences in classrooms, I often like to begin by looking for a meaningful and beautiful text. As we planned our robot curriculum we started with a series of books about robots. There were four books that stood out for us a the K-3 grade level. Three of the books about a robot and a child(Boy + Bot, Doug Unplugged, and Clink) picked up the theme of "imaginary friends." We also liked the DK book because it is an informational text with extensive descriptions of real and imaginary robots, the kind of books kids often spend hours pouring through all the information.

For the workshop we decided to focus on Clink, a story similar to the classic children's book Corduroy—a rusty robot waits in a store for someone to buy him. What we particularly liked were all the examples of different kinds of robots and their various purposes.

Next we talked about possibilities for the big idea and essential questions for the workshop. Jessica Ross from Harvard's Project Zero had just been to Vero Beach presenting on maker-centered learning. Since many of the teachers had attended her workshop we wanted to link our workshop with the ideas she's already introduced. In Jessica's presentation, teachers went through various "thinking routines" that could be used in maker spaces. One thinking routine she presented was called Parts, Purposes, and Complexities and another Imagine If (you can download the thinking routines here on the Agency by Design website). We decided to look at robots through the lens of "tools" and came up with three possible essential questions.

What is a tool?
How do tools work and how do they help us?
How can tools impact our lives?

We repeated an activity Jessica did in her presentation. We gave each table a tool (pencil sharpeners, hole punchers, staplers, toasters etc.) and asked them to sketch it, label its parts, and then discuss the purposes of each part. They then imagined ways to improve its function or aesthetics.

To further enter the idea of tools and robots, we watched a clip from the television show The Jetsons (from 55 years ago!) They considered in groups:

What tools from the Jetsons have become a reality today?

In groups, teachers then considered how our tools we be different 55 years from now in the year 2072.

Building Robots

After reading the book Click, we built our own robots. Previously, with similar projects, we've encouraged a series of drafts before the building process begins. For instance, sketching the robots, giving the robot personality traits (see again the Imaginary Friends post), and even writing monologues from the robot's perspective.

I'd been reading this lovely book Loose Parts about the need to just give children the open-ended opportunity to create with various related objects.

The Learning Alliance had just moved into a new office. Every day I was there working, new boxes would arrive and the packing materials were piling up. As Debbi, Fran, and I sat together planning this event I mentioned how I didn't want to use any fancy materials to build the robots, stuff that teachers wouldn't have the budget or time to buy. Debbi looked at the pile of boxes and said, "Let's just use all of that!" We collected boxes, plastic wrap, styrofoam, envelopes, cardboard (added tape and scissors), and hauled it all to the school, Vero Beach Elementary, where we were leading the workshop.

We asked the teachers to just grab materials and build a robot. No planning. No brainstorming. Just do it.

In after-school professional development workshops, teachers sometimes bring their young children with them. We were lucky that one of our teachers Ataaba Patterson, brought along her seven-year old son, Gavin Patterson. We invited him to make a robot and he quickly joined the teachers collecting supplies for his robot.

Watch Ataaba and Gavin making robots in the workshop below.

I love it when this happens in workshops—when children, after school, voluntarily put down their iPads or smart phones to join in the workshop. When this happens we know we have created a syntonic experience.

At the end of this day we asked everyone to leave their robot in front of their chairs. The entire room shifted to a new robot. After hearing what the original creator had in mind (function etc.), each person worked to improve someone else's robot. In this sense the robots became a collective project for the room. We shifted several more times. Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) founder Arnold Aprill came up with a term for this process: displacement. Arnold defines displacement as "transmutation through different media and through different creators." We do this when we might want to move students towards collaborative creation and working together in a larger community.

At the end of the workshop, teachers returned to their original robots and gave them a name and function.

Writing Robot Stories

Given that the second half of the workshop the next day was only two hours, we didn't have time to fully write robot stories, so instead we chose to focus on making a book cover and creating a narrative life for our robots.

We took black and white photographs of the robots and printed them out on a regular printer (again, using only the resources schools have quickly available).

Using the book jacket cover for Click as a model, the teachers created a cover page with a title for their story, a blurb on the jacket that hinted to the overall story, and a diagram of their robot's parts and purposes.