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August 06, 2008, 12:53 PM ET
28 Colleges and High Schools to Use Personal Robots in Class
The Institute for Personal Robots in Education, a partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bryn Mawr College, and Microsoft Research, has awarded grants to 28 colleges and high schools throughout the country to use personal robots to teach basic computing skills.
The education centers will share $250,000 and each one of them will receive a book-sized, on-wheels blue robot called Scribblers that students can program to perform simple tasks. The winning centers may chose to adopt the curricula, software, and text developed by the partnership or they can produce their own.
The partnership was created in 2006 to use robotics to make computer science more appealing and fight the plummeting rates of enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs, especially among women (The Chronicle, June 1, 2007).
Last fall, more than 400 students at Georgia Tech tried Scribbler. The students enrolled in the robotics-based courses had a higher pass rate than the traditional programming course and also reported that their interest about computers had increased after taking the classes. At Bryn Mawr, a women’s liberal-arts college, the enrollment of upper-level computer-science courses has gone up by more than four times since introducing the robot in the introductory course. —Maria José Viñas
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