At Georgia Tech, our students must take a senior design class before they can graduate and I often have them work together in groups to create something for me to use in my outreach to K-12 students. For example, I had a team create a LEGO robot that used the light sensor to read colors and play music. I had another team use an accelerometer to create a remote control for a LEGO NXT robot. I also had a team that created a bop-it type game using the PicoCrickets.
This semester I had some of my students create an activity for the Pleo robot from Ugobe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleo). These robots look like a baby dinosaur and act as if they are alive. They like to be petted and make noises to tell you if they are happy or sad. They have a color camera, a tilt sensor, sound sensors, and lots of touch sensors.
These robots are very engaging for both boys and girls. My research team tried the robots with several groups of elementary and middle school students. When they asked the kids what the worst thing about the project was the kids said, “ you made us leave the robots to go to lunch”. The robots can currently only be programmed using MySkit which is similar to Flash. Ugobe was working on a development kit in a C like language and had released a beta version of this environment. The biggest problem with the Pleos is the battery life. A fully charged battery only lasts about 1.5 hours and it takes 4 hours to fully charge.
Unfortunately, Ugobe has filed for bankruptcy. We bought 12 Pleos so that we can use them in our summer camps and outreach programs. Hopefully another company will buy the rights to these and continue this promising new direction in robotics. See http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/943 for the materials my senior design team created for the Pleo.
Barb Ericson
CSTA Board of Directors