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Teaching With Robots
theodp writes "If you're a math, CS, or engineering grad, odds are you've seen your share of robot-like teaching — but never an actual robot teacher. Now, that's starting to change. Computer scientists are developing robots with social components that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary, elementary imitation and taking turns. Several countries have been testing teaching machines in classrooms. At USC, researchers have had their robot, Bandit, interact with autistic children. South Korea is 'hiring' hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates and is experimenting with robots that would teach English."
I realise there seems to be a rather unhealthy obsession with robots in japan and korea but this is just going too far. You want some clunky pre-programmed robot to pander to your whims and stroke your ego - fine. But don't try the same shit with kids - its not fair. Get someone in to look after these children. If they're autistic they NEED to interact with people, not a glorified PC FFS.
I know researchers are doing their best but am I the only one who's really impatient for robots to begin integrating into society on a large scale? All we have so far outside of more progressive factories is a few tens of lab robots, floor cleaners, and lawn mowers. where's my robot maid dammit? why aren't robots fully integrated into the McDonald's supply chain reducing the price of my burger to 50 cents? Where are the road laying robots? where's my robochauffeur?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It's an European research project that studies social interactions of robots and people, and attempts to get around the uncanny valley, among other things. They already have some quite interesting results, although I can't really elaborate on their scientific side, social robots being outside of my field of interest.
Disclaimer: I know a few LIREC members personally.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
With unemployment as high as it is, you want to replace all remaining human occupied jobs with robots? What is wrong with you.
I'm autistic, and I can tell you the last thing autistic kids need teaching them how to act neurotypical is a robot mentor.
The dirty secret of Autism Speaks and just about everything else (such as the developers of these robots) is that they advocate for exhausted parents, annoyed relatives, and the profit motive of Western medicine; they don't do anything for actual autistic people.
www.autistics.org
If the robotic teaching of basic skills becomes commonplace it will be at the expense of human interaction.
We already have too many people who are dysfunctional in society and lacking in the basic human skills of communications, emotions and compassion. I do not see this as much of an advancement, it is just a means of reducing the "human" component of our educational system.
Tisha Hayes
Perhaps the poster is still reeling from this YouTube video...
You need machine foster parents for what is, probably, the only plausible way of getting our asses out of this system, assuming technology that seems to be certainly within our range - embryo colonization.
(yes, hibernation of a skeleton crew / very small group of initial settlers, with the main purpose of kickstarting the colony and the growth of stored embryos, might be close enough)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Or at least in a tiny minority. Perhaps the fact that you seem to want to be around robots instead of people says more about you than you might like.
At least the Koreans won't have to worry about robots molesting their kids.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a23_1271872896
I see this as mainly a friendlier interface to the age-old practice of computer drills. Modern technology allows you do more than the multiple choice question of olden days. It can interact via natural language (currently primitively).
Robots are neat and useful and all, but . . . come on, raising kids is arguably the most important work we do (yeah, I know, that doesn't exactly square with how we treat the people who already raise the kids, but I believe that's a separate argument). Young primates are supposed to learn how to be functional older primates from other older primates, that's just the way we work. Kids crave attention from people they look up to, and attention from the robots is not a replacement for that.
There are some really interesting (though not especially well written) books about how kids used to be better socially adjusted because they got their primary social learning from their parents and other closely associated adults, but now kids get too much of their social learning from other kids. That's why kids these days (oh dear, and I'm only 28) seem to think that adults are totally irrelevant. Removing yet another chance for there to be a caring, properly interacting adult around for large chunks of their daily lives is not going to help at all.
Oh and then there are the studies that show that infants don't learn language from the tv because the tv is not catching and holding their attention, and trying to see what they see.
So, these robots require copious amounts of High Fructose Corn Syrup and bottomless credit cards to function?
Oh, oh... oohhhh... English! Gotcha!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Cybernetic organisms. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
"... and is experimenting with robots that would teach English." How is a robot going to teach English to children, when google voice is lucky to get half the words correct in a message from a native English speaker?
The issue of robot teachers has been a topic of discussion for a long while here in Korea. Korean culture tends to be . . . xenophobic (let's not call them racists) and the media runs a lot of scaremongering about the pernicious effects of Native Speaking English Teachers, who come to Korea to get drunk, molest the children and make off with the womenfolk. While there are always a few bad apples in any group, crime rates among foreigners are proportionately much lower than among native Koreans, but anything to get the white devils out of the motherland is a step in the right direction.
both of these links have a good overview of what the foreigners- in-Korea bloggers have been writing about the topic, with links to more articles in the bodies of these posts.
http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2010/02/english-teachers-to-be-wiped-out-by.html
http://briandeutsch.blogspot.com/2010/03/koreas-robot-english-teachers-wont-go.html
Doomed I tell ye.....
.
Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
1) Take robots
2) Teach robots to teach eachother
3) Endless loop of robots getting smarter and smarter
4) ???
5) Profit!
And where are the engineers learning social skills in order to to program said skills into robots?
/sorry, too easy..
My kid would rather learn to read from a robot than from a teacher. I realize autism is a whole different world but
there are some kids who would enjoy playing with a robot and learning at the same time. Its not the only
form of education they should have but a robot to teach you a second language is not a bad idea.
The day is coming when a mechanical surrogate may come to the door. Very much like Ray Bradbury's, "I Sing the Body Electric". But the day in which Asimov's 3 Laws is a long way off. Robots have one thing that Man has always coveted, "The Concurring of Time". It will take about 40 years to see how Robots can teach children. Some will fail, some will succeed. But the both groups can offer to each other what the other desires most.
I suspect you didn't RTFAs, since one covers the issue of not catching (and then catching) an infant's attention.
Hello. I DRTFA and barely RTFS, but none the less I came up with this:
This is not that new. Behaviourists thought that people could be programmed like Pavlovs dogs, but they were wrong, generally speaking. Behaviourism (getting stars etc for good behaviour) is, however, often, a last and successful resource when it comes to autistic people. So why not have robots or computers dispersing the behavourism. You know Skinner thought machines that asked questions and gave rewards was good for kids in general (and some things, like for example all the places and shapes of countries on the map, could be taught efficiently with simple computer games). Most knowledge and learning is more fuzzy and doesn't fit into a simple computer game.
(apologies for maybe being totally off topic)
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
simpsons did it! or at least they had the idea to use them to end a strike.
tic tac toe
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