An educational robotics kit developed at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is fostering an interest in technology that goes a step beyond simply putting supplied parts together.
The Hummingbird kit consists of a customized control board, along with a variety of lights, sensors, and motors that can be connected to the controller without soldering. With a free, easy-to-learn drag-and-drop environment, students armed with paper, paint, cardboard, and a little imagination can program their creations without prior experience.
"We want students to become inventors of technology rather than users of technology," Illah Nourbakhsh, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon, said in a press release. His CREATE Lab developed the Hummingbird for a project called Arts & Bots. "Hummingbird feeds a student's natural curiosity about technology by enabling her to incorporate robotics into something she is making that is meaningful or useful."
This crafty little man, powered by the Hummingbird kit, plays a drum. (Source: Carnegie Mellon University)
For example, students in West Virginia recently built a working replica of R2D2 from Star Wars. A class elsewhere created a cardboard dragon that turns its head and tries to bite anyone who gets too close. (You can watch a video of this dragon on the next page.)
"The Arts & Bots program is not a robot kit where you open a box and put all the provided pieces together by following a given set of instructions and all the finished robots look and function the same way," Zee Poerio, a teacher at St. Louise de Marillac Catholic School in Pittsburgh, said in the release. Her students used the kit to build a coin monster for the school's ancient coin exhibit. "The Hummingbird provides the students with the ability to make the robots unique not only in design, but in their function."
I have a meeting scheduled with the Huntsville Public Library to talk about STEM initiatives and how they can support it. Yes, girls definitely need to be part of the tech revolution that is going on and kits like the one discuss in your article will help to motivate them.
As a parent with kids in middle and soon to be high school (and public school, to boot) I'm seeing far more focus on STEM offerings and definitely some effort to slant the curriculum towards girls. All good stuff and this is just another example of some of the tools they can take advantage of.
STEM is live and well and the Hummingbird kit is just another example of tools created to inspire and motivate the engineers of tomorrow, our children. Nice article!
I agree Nancy, that this kit will do a lot to encourage girls to explore areas of interest they likely would never have explored if left to traditional robotics and engineering training. I have both a son and daughter and while my son played with Legos and Lego Mindstorm, my daughter wouldn't have touched Mindstorm with a 10-foot pole. But this kit would definitely make her take a second look.
I agree Jennifer - I love the creativity that can be introduced into these projects. Lego Mindstorm from what I have seen attracts mostly boys - they do classes at our local rec center. I can just picture an eigth grade girl designing a butterfly flapping its wings to put in her room using paper towel tubes and cardboard with paint and glitter...and learning all about programming, sensors and servo motors in the process...
Beth: The "crafty little man" was intended to be Ringo Starr. :-)
Video is here: http://robotdiaries.posterous.com/beatlebot-ringo-video
Curriculum is here: http://robotdiaries.posterous.com/latest-postings-by-diane-lally
Charles: The Hummingbird can indeed be programmed using a (open source) visual programming environment. It's available here: http://artsandbots.com/visualprogrammer/ Support for Snap, another visual programming environment, is coming soon. More advanced users can program it in Java or Processing, with other languages coming soon. See here for more info: http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/?q=content/software
(full disclosure: I work for the CREATE Lab and wrote the majority of the Hummingbird's software)
Nice story, and cool video, Jenn. There's a lot going on in engineering toys these days -- after about two decades with almost nothing. These new versions are more complex than the Erector Sets and Heath Kits of my childhood. Snap Circuits is another engineering toy.
Lego Mindstorm has a logic controller at its heart, with sensors and servos for inputs and outputs. Build a mechanism, program the controller, and watch your creation move.
Yes, you're limited to Lego hardware, but then again, when was someone LIMITED by Lego?
My statement about low cost was creating motion with paper (as shown in the image), compared to Lego (which has never been called a low-cost toy).
TJ, I'm not familiar with Lego Mindstorm. Am I correct in assuming, though, that several different things can be built, but that they must be built from the Lego kit? What I like about this is that the sky's the limit in terms of materials.
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