Robot Invasion! The Rise of Educational Robotics
07-12, 11:00–11:50 (US/Eastern), Tobin 201/202

Robots are here, and they're invading our schools, homes, and libraries! Now more than ever, there's a plethora of choices for teachers and parents to teach coding and engineering skills. Students from kindergarten to college can sharpen their STEM skills with the robot of their choice, but with so many options out there it's hard to know where to start. What robot is right for your students or children? Finding out would normally require extensive time and research, but this talk will help to provide an overview of your options.

During the course of this talk, you'll see demonstrations of many of the leading educational robots, and even a few that are less well known. This overview of your robot options will cover a spectrum from the easiest, screen-free codable robots for the youngest children to robots that rely on block-based coding such as Scratch and Tynker, and finally those robots that work with script code like Python. Discover for yourself exactly what you can choose from to enrich your children's education with the robot that will work best for them.

Lee Hollman has been a New York City teacher for 20 years. Raised on Long Island and on a steady diet of kaiju movies, Star Trek reruns, and Radio Shack electronics kits, Lee now teaches coding, robotics, and more to kids as young as kindergarten age. A proud father of two geeky daughters, he spends his scant spare time finding new robots to play with at home and at school.