waste as tool to inspire potential computing students

Originally posted as: http://computingnorthampton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/waste-as-tool-to-inspire-potential.html in 2012.

A recent article in the Northampton Herald and Post " How a university is using waste as tool to inspire students" by Lawrence John discusses the Junkbots project. 

"FUNNY looking robots called junkbots could be the key to encouraging more children across the county to become engineers, computer programmers or scientists.

One force which is driving this idea forward is the University of Northampton.

For the past few years, staff from its science and technology department have been going out to primary and secondary schools to spread the word that science is fun.

By working with schools, the university hopes to show pupils a different side to computing and hopefully raise their interest in what they can achieve" Lawrence John

For the whole article click here.this takes you to the Newspaper site.


To read more about the junkbot project go to: http://junkbots.blogspot.co.uk/




I would be interest in hearing from others who are doing similar things, please feel free to add a comment below.


All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

NAO, chatbots, teaching and just plain showing off

I  managed to do something I have want to do for a long time, show off social robots; (now I have three goes at it) thanks to the recent purchase of NAO robots by the University of Northampton. 

Session 1
In an in-reach STEAM activity day I have had the opportunity to show the robots in action to a group of 8 years olds. As well presenting a short presentation on social robots.

Meeting our robots at our #science day for girls pic.twitter.com/0XwllXL40s

— Chris Fidler (@Chris_UNPR) March 3, 2016

Meet Smurf and Red at Girls S.T.E.A.M. @UniNorthants @scottturneruon @Changemaker_Hub @nick_petford pic.twitter.com/ZMt07ZrSVh

— STEM at UN (@STEMatUN) March 3, 2016

Social robots meet red and smurf from Scott Turner

I would be interested to hear how others are using NAOs via comments.



Session 2 and 3
I have managed to include a physical example of Social Robots into my teaching. The aim of the session was to teach about social AI, revolving around the using social cues, to a certain extent, using natural language through chatbots, for us to communicate with machines.

The robots were used as an example of a social robot,  the way we want to play with or work with them, without having to going through a steep learning curve on how to use them. Students were encouraged to consider why this was and that anthropomorphisation plays a part (NAO basically has some of the characteristics of a small child). The fact that it responds to voice commands, its looks, has a childlike voice, that it always moving (even slightly when standing) and the way it moves; were spotted by the group as ways it attracts us to it - it is really hard not to talk to it like a child sometimes (but perhaps that is just me).

This session also included the use of chatbots (one example, ALICE used is shown here) and AIML, Artificial Intelligence Markup Language, (a link to more about AIML is included below). Just as a bit of background, chatbots (also called variously, chatterbots, conversational agents, etc) are programs that hold a conversation with us using through either text or speech. The chatbots were used to show how we can create intelligent-like behave by in effect providing responses to questions. Followed by, how we then take this further by using the responses people give, while using the chatbot, to 'fine-tune' the model.

To read more about NAO robots go to https://www.aldebaran.com/en

To read more on AIML go to http://www.alicebot.org/aiml.html

Example chatbots

• ALICE http://alice.pandorabots.com/ (the one shown in the picture above).
• Mitsuku http://www.mitsuku.com/
• An example of an MSc student's work on Chatbots  http://computingnorthampton.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/msc-student-work-chatbot-innovative.html
• A good source of further examples can  found at https://www.chatbots.org/country/uk .

If you would like to create your own chatbot personally I think one of the easiest ways to start is through https://playground.pandorabots.com/en/quickstart/

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.