A Simple Robot Dance

A simple but cool robot dance video from last years International Robotic's Olympiad.  

MEDIA ALERT!

DENVER – The Colorado Convention Center will play host to the prestigious International Robot Olympiad (IRO) in December, 2013, marking the first time in the IRO’s 15-year history that it will be held in North America.

The IRO is an annual competition of the world’s top robotics students, with over 1,000 students from around the world participating. It is unique among robotics competitions, focusing as much on creativity and artistry as on technical skills. The marquee event, Robot Dance, has a universal appeal that cuts across social, cultural and academic boundaries.

Students at the IRO compete in over a dozen different competitions, Olympiad style, during the four-day event that also includes a variety of cultural activities and an educational symposium featuring world-renowned guest speakers.

The successful Denver bid was sponsored by Ameribotics, a local non-profit organization committed to whole-person development through robotics, in partnership with VisitDenver, and supported by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and U.S. Senator Michael Bennet.

"I believe Robot Dance is going to revolutionize the way we think about education," Ameribotics Executive Director Randy Menzer said, "The skill set it takes to make a robot tell a story, and then program it to express that 'story' in dance form, is truly like an intellectual 'Super Food'."

Headquartered in Colorado, Ameribotics is working to create a variety of opportunities for educators and students that introduce them to robotics. Ameribotics camps and competitions work to engage children (and adults) in real-life, project-based, hands-on problem-solving exercises, at the same time blending art and science and promoting both left-brained (logical) and right-brained (conceptual) development.

A Robot that Flies like a Bird

It's a bird, it's a plain, NO IT'S A ROBOT! This is like the Wright brothers 2.0 and a toy I definitely want for Christmas this year. I think we can finally say that world robotics are officially "taking flight".

Robotics a tool for creation for Highlands Ranch STEM facilitator

To read a short and sweet article written by the Denver Post.com  about our recent Super Camp, please click this LINK.

Robot Landing on Mars

If you didn't think robots were cool before this video, you will undoubtedly after it! Hard to imagine we have such things going on in robotics as we speak and even harder to imagine how much more the future holds for the advancement of robotics.

Robots Fighting

This is more for a laugh than anything else, but I figured I would put up a slightly different side to robot competitions.  I remember when this used to be a big deal and you could watch these "battles" on ESPN and the like. It is somewhat inane watching robots destroy each other but it is neat to see the ingenuity of some of the contestants and how serious the guy looks when he loses his little warrior. The more I look for videos with robots dancing or fighting like this one, it makes me wonder more and more just how much could we accomplish with robotics?

One Classroom, Many Minds; A Paddle for the Mainstream

 

''Some students have needs that are simply too far from the norm to meet adequately in regular classrooms,''        This quote in a way sums up this 'New York Times' post about differentiated instruction in todays schools.  This fairly lengthy article goes through the pros and cons of this teaching ideology and may by the end give you a slightly different opinion of how today's children should be taught.

By Fran Schumer

Published: November 9, 2003

Montclair, N.J.— SOME fourth graders at the Rand School read at second-grade level; some have already finished ''Lord of the Rings.'' So Cheryl Caggiano organizes her class into clusters based on proficiency, each with a different book and assignment. At any given time, four things are going on at once in Ms. Caggiano's classroom.
Students who struggle with comprehension might be working on questions about their book, while others do an activity that helps them analyze characters and themes. One group might be drilling vocabulary, while another practices sentence structure. In social studies and science, Ms. Caggiano likes to ''mix it up.'' She may put a strong reader with a poor one ''so they can teach each other,'' or put students who think abstractly with ones who only get the point if they actually see it.
If this sounds like a lot of work for the teacher, it is. ''It's crazy, insane, and I don't get paid enough,'' Ms. Caggiano says. Still, she prefers this approach. ''When you teach the same lesson to the whole class, you'll see it in their faces: some kids are completely lost, others are bored,'' she says. ''This way I know the students better, and they're more involved in the process, too.''
Ms. Caggiano is a practitioner of differentiated instruction, a method of teaching students of different abilities in a single classroom. The approach was popularized in the late 1990's by Carol Ann Tomlinson, a professor of education at the University of Virginia. Dr. Tomlinson did not invent the concept, or even coin the phrase, but she laid out a how-to strategy for the ''inclusive'' classroom in her book ''Differentiated Classroom,'' which many regard as the bible of differentiation. Instead of ''What am I supposed to teach now?'' the differentiated teacher asks, ''What does this student need to learn next and what is the most effective way for me to teach it?'' To answer those questions, Dr. Tomlinson adapted a number of progressive strategies already in use, including group learning, peer collaboration and teaching to different learning styles.
Given the increasing number of learning-disabled students and children who speak English as a second language who show up in the same class with gifted students, it's not surprising that the idea has become so pervasive.  Click HERE for the rest of the article