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A Robot In Every Korean Kindergarten By 2013?
kkleiner writes "Elementary school children in Korea in the cities of Masan and Daegu are among the first to be exposed to EngKey, a robotic teacher. The arrival of EngKey to Masan and Daegu is just a small step in the mechanization of Korean classrooms: the Education Ministry wants all 8400 kindergartens in the nation to have robotic instructors by the end of 2013. Plans are already under way to place 830 bots in preschools by year's end. EngKey can hold scripted conversations with students to help them improve their language skills, or a modified version can act as a telepresence tool to allow distant teachers to interact with children."
and is down to the cost of energy vs the cost of people . People are taxed at 40%.
... that you can now pwn an entire generation?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Your child has failed the Turing test.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
I'm assuming this means all South Korean classrooms. I dread to think what kind of robots Kim Jong Il would want to put in classrooms...
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Have you seen a Korean child? Think of a ragdoll cat. You put it somewhere (with books and toys in hand) and you can safely come back a couple of hours later. It will be there and you will not hear a squeak in the meantime. I have no idea how they do it and I am not sure if I should admire it or get shivers from it.
In any case, a robot will not survive 15 minutes in a classroom with average European (or american for that matter) kids. I know what my daughter will do. If she cannot get her hands on a screwdriver she will craft herself a replacement out of whatever she can find and start disassembling the thing until she has figured out what makes it tick or it is so dead that she will lose interest. That is probably still better than the reaction of her brother who would simply use it for target practice.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Why? Why I was born in 1975? I want to be a korean child!!!1
Will teachers get fired?
www.refacer.us
Lil Kim Il does baby !!
Uunify the Korean Penisula TODAY !! so we can send our boys home TOMORROW !!
DMZ is so 1950s !! And what is it doing in my ROUTER ??
Park, #1
...Just what kind of Apple do you give a robot teacher anyway?
Life is better in Lingerie.
I think we should be told how many of our current teachers are robots!
Yes, such robots seem somewhat superficial now (where are all the old people / couldn't they us them?); perhaps the rate of progress made many of us think in terms of quickly showing tangible benefits & utility of something (which was rarely the case, for most things around us)
But "descendants" of such robots might prove crucially important in one of our "ultimate" endeavors ... after they've been sufficiently improved, most likely over the course of centuries. Well, those might be first steps of that process.
Fitting, considering the region is revving up its space programs? ;p
(yes, hibernation being also a possibility - question is, at what cost of mass to support one grown human vs. equivalent mass of fully automated systems meant to kickstart the colony; and the crew would be usually of skeleton size at most anyway, with robots certainly still crucial)
One that hath name thou can not otter
rt, too sexy, yeah!
Right said, Fred. Believe it or not it's Kim's favorite tune.
I would not hesitate to put her through the meat grinder if she ever damaged my $4500 desktop computer or any of the surrounding computer equipment.
Your computer alone costs $4500? Without counting the peripherals?
The 1980s called and they want their $4500 desktops back.
If a particular culture wishes to subject their offspring to this kind of learning experience, so be it
As opposed to a culture that subjects their offspring to insufficiently trained, badly paid, undermotivated human teachers? And after school they sit in front of the TV?
EngKey can hold scripted conversations with students to help them improve their language skills
Scripted conversations are better compared to normal human conversations in helping young children develop language skills? What a joke.
Producer: You are an incredible robot, A.W.E.S.O.M.-O. I was just wondering, are you by chance a *pleasure* model?
A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: What?
Producer: Have you been programmed to satisfy urges of humans?
A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: A.W.E.S.O.M.-O does not understand.
Producer: Let me show you what I mean.
in three to five years, Engkey will mature enough to replace native speakers.
This is another one of Korea's stupid ideas to save a quick buck. At one point they tried to have Korean teachers replace the foreign teachers saying that they could do the job just as well. Obviously, it didn't work. Not only because they have poor hiring standards across the board (cheapest = best) but also because it's very difficult to teach a language without native speaking knowledge.
Robots teaching kids? Stupid and destined to fail.
Supposedly Harry Harlow died in 1881, but substitute rhesus monkeys for the Korean kindergartners and this could be one of his experiments.
This is another one of Korea's stupid ideas to save a quick buck. At one point they tried to have Korean teachers replace the foreign teachers saying that they could do the job just as well. Obviously, it didn't work. Not only because they have poor hiring standards across the board (cheapest = best) but also because it's very difficult to teach a language without native speaking knowledge./p>
Poor hiring standards are one thing... But I really disagree with the rest of your post. You are implying that one can't teach [language] well if they aren't native speakers? Once you know a language well enough (IE: have the masters degree in it), you certainly can teach it very well regardless of whether you are a native speaker or not. It even helps if you aren't one (You know what kind of things were hardest to learn, what kind of errors are easiest to make, etc.). My english is far from perfect but I think it is pretty decent considering that this is my second language and I haven't really studied this since the elementary school (very little in high school and a course or two in college). I've never had a teacher who would've been a native speaker, for that matter.
I'm a tech savvy guy, and I like the idea of these robots being there to 'assist' teachers in educating students in a specific subject matter. It will be like an ice-breaker for these little kids while learning as well.
However I'm a little bit disinclined about the idea that robots would entirely replace a human teacher, maybe not this time around. There is no equivalent algorithm to represent the very complex human emotion.
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The head part sort of looks like a space marine. I think I see where this is going.
I, for one, welcome our robotic Korean kindergarten overlords.
No left turn unstoned.
Its not just the robots - its also the users. So we have these kids that are growing up being taught by robots. Just like how Generation Y embraced the internet and turned it into what it is today, let us wait and see what dreams and innovations these kids make by being exposed to them, making robots a normalcy.
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
I think I see where this is going too...
In Korea, only young people have robo...
I for one welcome our new child-rearing robot overlor...
In Soviet Korea, robot constructs y...
Never mind... too many choices!
...is a robot babe in every guys bed.
That is an interesting metaphor because in America, our Kindergarten teachers are more like cat herders!
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
I'm very glad about this. My Robot Child has been having a hard time at school, because it has different needs than everyone else. Now maybe it'll be happy...?
Robotic teachers will surely be adored by kids, however, I still prefer real people for real students.
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-- CantLiveWithoutMyPC
1. A kindergarten teacher may not injure a kindergartener or, through inaction, allow a kindergartener to come to harm.
2. A kindergarten teacher must obey any orders given to it by a kindergartener, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A kindergarten teacher must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Terminator meets Kindergarten Cop
'nuff said.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
I read "A Robot In Every Korean Kindergartener By 2013? " Wayyyy scarier.
I had read it as him saying that the Korean kids were better-behaved than their counterparts
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
This is awesome. When I was in lower grade school in the 60s, there was a rare moment when a teacher said: 'Heads up -- your future is going to be highly automated. You are not going to be able to get good paying jobs doing simple things. You've got to get smart.'
It wasn't said loudly. In those classes, almost every kid had a dad working a great blue-collar union job that paid much better than teaching. It was a clean, safe, two-car + swimming pool suburbia that stretched to the horizon.
And that was the end of it. Outside of pulp sci-fi, nobody ever thought about the problem of what we're going to do when there's more people than we need to support society. Result was a generation that shops at WalMart while bitching about layoffs, and has no plan forward other than "I've got mine Jack."
At least these kids are going to be facing their future of expendability directly, daily.
that we should double the number of adults in the classroom. i don't mean smaller classes... i mean MORE adults in the room. One up front teaching and one in the back preventing distractions and bullying. The second adult doesn't have to have a Bachelor's degree, just a keen eye, patience and a bit of courage. This would be most useful in elementary years when the kids no longer worship their teacher. If the kids grow up with this, they might not need such supervision later in high school.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Wait and see and mimic, also be exposed - might help with not getting old too fast.
One that hath name thou can not otter