Robots go to school

We could name the students of School nr. 21 not only like-minders, but colleagues - in this school students can study in 3 varieties of classes specialising either in Music, English, or Robotics and Entrepreneurship. Although we are yet to put to test elementary students’ entrepreneurship skills, as far as it concerns robotics their profound knowledge impressed us alot.

Children had a opportunity to use and compare all three models of telepresence robots that we have - Temi, Double 3 and Ohmni in a variety of different scenarios and afterwards we asked their opinion whether such devices could find their place in schools. It appeared that although almost have of the respondents would rather prefer a teacher to be physically present in the class, they mostly would not mind their classmates to use robots for telepresence.

We also noticed a very peculiar thing - the participants very often would try to crush the robots into one another. Why? Well, one of the most popular robotics competitions is a so called “sumo” when two robots try to push the competitor outside of a boundary of a circle drawn on the floor and it seems that our robots did not avoid this settled habit.

More details on the event from TalTech PR department (in Estonian).