Chinese startup Makeblock is bringing robots to classrooms | Hacker News Reader

Chinese startup Makeblock is bringing robots to classrooms

fastcompany.com

38 pointsjohnshades9 comments

Well, as long as they're not going to eventually replace the teachers, I think that this is a great idea to teach kids. It's innovative and it will inspire them to actually pay attention to their lesson. It will also allow them to learn the lesson quickly, right?

I work at Makeblock so I will chime in. We design our robots to be a tool for educators that, as you mention, helps them make classes so much more engaging.

The number of students who will be able to learn, and be interested in learning, to program or to engage with scientific subjects when they see their instructions executed by their own coding companion right in front of them is so much greater than those who will find an IDE exciting. I started programming in QBASIC when I was around 10 but got bored pretty quickly as writing text-based games isn't that exciting, and started playing games instead. I probably could've been a lot better at programming today if I'd had something to keep me engaged.

We have a whitepaper available that is written by an organization that have created their STEM courses around our robots, for those that are interested: https://educators.makeblock.com/whitepaper-how-to-design-ste...

That's good, because one of the misconceptions when it comes to robots and other automation is that it will take people's jobs away from them. I do believe that there's a middle ground that we can find where robots and humans can work side by side. This (as in education) is one of them. Students tend to get bored easily in class. If you bring this in, they will engage and pay attention more, which seems to me is what your company aims to achieve. Great job on that!

The only problem I can see here is that not all schools will be able to afford this because not every school has a budget for this.

Anything that makes a classroom more like the workplace of the future is a win.

I think we have a much higher probability of humans assembling robots in an office environment than needing to use a book or to know cursive.

Not that we have a high probability that humans will build robots in an office.

The role of School should be to grow kids into smart and empathetic grown ups that understand how the world works and can find their place in it.

It's not just there to prepare people for the cubicle.

I don't think a classroom should resemble a workplace, much less a workplace of the future as we currently imagine it.

Thank you for putting my thoughts into words. The comment you replied to is an incredibly depressing way to look at life.

I agree. In my personal opinion, these robots will help the students learn more and pay more attention, but preparing them for the cubicle is just... idk. I mean, in case of high school students or grade schoolers, we don't know where they will end up in. If you prepare them for the office now, they might just get bored when they finally enter the world of (un)employment. Plus, if you do a workplace setting, chances are you'd see students sleeping in their own cubicle during class.

Pretty sure books are going to be around for a while.

I've got the mbot robot from them which is pretty cool - https://www.makeblock.com/steam-kits/mbot

It was a little fiddly to get it working via bluetooth via Linux with the 'scratch' interface, but I did eventually manage to get it to work :) (by choosing serial port, rather than the bluetooth button, and using Linux's rfcomm module)

We've only tried simple things with it so far like making the robot controllable via the keyboard which works pretty well.

This reminds me I need to finish building a decent line follower in scratch.

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