Feature a Teacher: NAO as a dancing tool to understand human-robot interaction. 

Amy LaViers is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and director of the RAD Lab a website of Robotics Automation and Dance (RAD). During her PhD Thesis she realized that Nao robot is the tool for her engaging for the public and researches alike.  

Feature a Teacher: NAO as an Athlete!

Feature a Teacher: NAO Assisting Students Across a Broad Spectrum

Benjamin Durham is a science teacher at Lane Technical High School in Chicago who has been using NAO in Robotics 2 and Adaptive Robotics. In Robotics 2, an intermediate-level robotics class, students use both Choregraphe and Python to program NAO. Many of these students have aspirations of going into medical or social work, and wanted hands-on experience of what robots might be able to do in these fields.

Feature a Teacher: Using NAO in Behavior Analysis

Thus far, NAO and other humanoid robots are commonly used successfully to help teach children STEM subjects, as well as help children with autism learn social skills. But there is one education program using NAO in a completely different way - and with some very promising results.

Dr. Ellie Kazemi is a behavior analyst who is using NAO in a very unique way. She is currently a Professor of Psychology and the Academic Director of the Masters of Science in Applied Behavior Analysis Program at California State University, Northridge (CSUN.) For her research, she and her students are using NAO to simulate a child with problem behavior in order to find helpful strategies in training caregivers (staff, teachers, etc.) how to deal with problem behavior.

Dr. Kazemi has been able to secure some research and training funds to purchase three NAOs, warranties, and licenses to engage research assistants in science and technology. The funds were provided through the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the National Institute of Health-Build Poder.

Programming NAO to display undesirable behavior (i.e., to be “bad”) and then running simulations helps the students learn in hands-on labs. The team has the robot throw tantrums, hit himself, and more - even programming in variations so he looks and acts a little different in each simulation. This gives them a lot of control in the types of behavior the person they are training gets to see.

 A successful Case Study at Albany High School 

At RobotLAB, we are always working hard to bring unique experiences to classrooms. Developing NAO has allowed us to do this- revitalizing the way STEM is being taught all the way down to the very first educational stages. 

Recently, we carried out a Demo Lesson partnering with Albany High School. On this occasion, we used NAO robot to work with students on English subjects - an experience that gave us great insights into how robotics can influence learning in multiple ways. 

So, what kind of impression did NAO make on students? What do they think now about engineering and overall learning? Let's find out! 

Machine Talk

Last month Amazon purchased Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. This is incredible news for several reasons!

 First, it shows the phenomenal success of young companies that emerged from the information technology revolution a few decades ago. Think about what Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple achieved in the past 20 years. Their success is both amazing and inspiring!

 Second is the story behind this purchase. Jeff Bezos just wanted to buy some fruits at Whole Foods, but Alexa didn’t understand it correctly…

Of course, this is a joke. But a powerful one!

Humor says a lot about the culture of its time. And this tells us an interesting story about where today’s technology is going. We are entering an era where we talk to our devices. This brings the biggest change yet to the integration of technology and our lives.

Communication and language are key to the evolution and development of species. And particularly for us humans.

Students at Folsom High School learned how to program with the Nao Robot check out the amazing results!

Beginning computer science students at Folsom High School, in Folsom, California, have been learning how to program using the NAO Robot. After the lessons in the curriculum completed, teams of four students were required to write a lesson plan before they started programming which would include the following:

• Grade level taught 

• Subject NAO will be teaching

• Summary of the lesson

• Materials needed to complete the lesson

• A detailed description of the program by using a textual storyborad format

They were then to work as a team to program this lesson, problem solve, work out bugs, and then video tape the lesson once it was working properly. check out the videos, programmig can be fun! 

 NAO robot teach Bowling

Washoe County School District Gifted and Talented Program- Case Study

Washoe County School District Gifted and Talented Program- Case Study with RobotLAB at NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) Conference 2016 

I am Cheri Di Martino. I am the Director of Washoe county School District – our gifted program. And we are really excited to talk about NAO with you today. What we did in Washoe County is we knew we needed to get into the 21^st century, we knew we needed to teach kids at a level they needed to be taught, so we were looking for a partner that could take us into the 21st century and get those NAGC standards, our state standards and have this beautiful marriage together. Well, what we found was RobotLAB, and we found the NAO robot. So what we asked was could a picturesque humanoid robot achieve what we wanted to achieve in Washoe County? This is something that could really help take our 

students to a whole other level. This is something I'm feeling very passionate about, but I could feel passionate about something, but will everybody else around me feel that same passion, that same energy and want to buy into this incredible, incredible product.               

Students' Voice On Learning With Robots

One of the top priorities at RobotLAB is encouraging a revolution in STEM education. We bring the best of technology into the classroom, not just as a cool-tool, but as a real teaching aid that helps educators engage students and bring abstract concepts to life.

The NAO robot is a good example of this kind of teaching aid.

In our everlasting mission to optimize the way NAO is used in the classroom, we took it to a classroom at Oakland Unified School District and analyzed how students responded to this enhanced learning experience.

RobotLAB new learning platform Engage! K-12 won the Best of Show award from Teach & Learning at TCEA 2017!

Engage! K-12 is an interactive and hands-on learning experience organized by eye-catching themes (such as soccer-playing robots or autonomous cars). Students and teachers can access the browser-based learning ecosystem from any device. A user-friendly interface allows teachers, even those with zero programming experience, to bring their lessons to life with virtual or physical robots.