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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."
What's destructive/violent about disassembling something to learn how it works? Oddly enough it's what I did as a child, and now as an adult (this skill is particularly valuable in the security industry for finding and fixing vulnerabilities). As for the target practice comment I look forward to teaching my kids how to throw accurately (as an adult I can underhand lob a bag of garbage a good 20 feet into the trash can outside, saving me about half of the walk which is especially practical in a Canadian winter).
Please don't teach children that it is wrong to be curious (e.g. disassembling things). We need people who actually care about how stuff works (hint: you're using a computer. not invented by the timid and afraid to break things)
So what, punish (and put on pills if that does not work) every child which has a curiosity how things work? Punish (and put on pills if that does not work) every child that would question the authority of an adult.
Wonderful idea. That has been tried by the way and is the standard tactics of lazy and incompetent teachers especially in some countries. The ballpark figures for the UK are that more than 25% of children with special statements have them for exactly that reason - their teacher at some point was too lazy and incompetent to enforce authority and went for the easy way out (that was on the BBC and a few major newspapers by the way, I am not inventing that number)
The result of such laziness is also well known - it is well known which countries end up exporting intellectual labour or importing brains.
No thanks, I would rather have my 2 and a half year old disassembling toys and picking locks (which she does) and my 8 year old try his luck in an authority contest with any new teacher he has. By the way he won in reception and year one vs both teacher and headmaster leading to the point where the incompetent dolts in those schools trying to stitch him with a statement. He has lost the contest with every teacher since in his new school. Lots of headache for me, but hey, that is what children are for - to give parents a headache once in a while.
And going back to the original topic - I cannot see anyone growing up while allowed to question authority and tinker with things not making a mockery of a robot teacher. That may work only in a society which has considerably harder concepts of seniority and authority than EU/US.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.