Robots could take place of pupils who cannot attend school in person | Hacker News Reader

Robots could take place of pupils who cannot attend school in person

bristolpost.co.uk

18 pointsvitabenes21 comments

The extreme lengths the state will go thru to make sure everyone is attending school... what's wrong with online/virtual learning? Imagine if you could select from the very best rather than being limited to your own school district.

> what's wrong with online/virtual learning

This is a good question and one I don’t know the answer to. From the rest of your comment it seems like your answer might be “nothing.”

Is that accurate or do you see issues with online/virtual learning?

Online school has been horrible for many children’s educational outcomes this past year. Getting some of them to actually attend and pay attention has been impossible. Maybe in households with attentive available parents it would be fine, but as it is it’s helped to expand the education gap across the US

> Getting some of them to actually attend and pay attention has been impossible.

The solution then is obviously to lock students in a room that they can't escape!

Might not help with the attention part though (based on my own observation and experience.)

Kids are curious and natural learners - I think we have to ask ourselves: how can we nurture this instinct rather than killing it?

I mean school should absolutely be better, but 13 year olds aren’t exactly known for making informed choices about their future and we have been trying the online school thing and the results don’t look good. We need to be evidence based about this and not just base it on what feels right or we think would have helped us

I think remote learning is great, and I've benefited greatly from MOOCs for example, as well as online course materials, textbooks, and videos. It's great for self-directed learning, and it can be very good if you can get personalized help and guidance from an instructor.

However, Kindergartens, labs, and in-person campuses can be better for:

- social interaction

- learning from other students

- personal attention from teachers

- hands-on stuff: tools, toys, books, notebooks, art and craft supplies, lab equipment, etc.

- engaging your non-visual senses

- physical movement and exercise

It has more to do with the way we measure academic success, politicians exercising their power, maintaining the status quo. Not much on the quality of education.

I believe frontal lessons + tests to be a terrible way to learn for roughly half of the kids and they would definitely thrive with more self directed learning (think project based learning).

There are other problems linked to not physical attending schools (eg. socialising with peers, having a routine based on locations and activities) but this robot doesn't solve that as well

Also a robot is going to be far more expensive than something like a VR classroom. VR classrooms solves the socializing aspect. Also another benefit to a VR classroom would be potentially less bullying based on gender/race/weight if you can select whatever avatar you want

This story is about a child with special needs being able to enjoy some level of parity with their classmates. One of the basic principles/aspirations of state education is that it offers the same experience to all students. Not all students have the same environment for learning at home.

Additionally teaching requires some level of personal interaction. Students competing for places at the virtual school with the best reputation sounds pretty dystopian to me.

What significant benefit is gained over using a small robot called a “video camera” in the classroom to film the lecture?

Sounds like it has a speaker, microphone, and possibly motors for moving parts? Calling it "telepresence" is a bit of a stretch, though..

This is a textbook definition of telepresence.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/telepresence

> What significant benefit is gained over using a small robot called a “video camera” in the classroom to film the lecture?

The robot in the picture is a No Isolation AV1. It allows the pupil at to do a little more than a video camera. For example, to look around in the classroom and raise its hand by turning the robots head blue.

More information on their website: https://www.noisolation.com/uk/av1/?

I still do not see the benefit from this. Being able to look around the classroom has little benefit. Indicating that I have a question Can be done with a chat interface. This seems more like a Solution looking for a problem.

Thus robots are not meant as a replacement for virtual learning, but as a way for students to follow the normal education when they are temporarily away.

For the last two years, I have been taking an MBA, and my school had thus robots. When students could not come to class, they could still attend by using a AV1. It is not so easy for the teachers to also have to do a virtual meeting simultaneously as teaching the regular class, so the alternative is often that the teachers just send out their slide deck to those that were not present, so the student can self-study. The robot also has batteries, so we took it with us to group work, lunches, and parties. Here is a picture of my group during the second covid surge, hammering away on our digital business model assignment: https://www.instagram.com/p/CCGS2lxhgcU/ .

Maybe serve as a physical reminder for your friends that you are still part of the class to make it easier when you then get back?

I think I agree with this being over-hyped, but trying to look for reasons it might be a good idea.

Telepresence is a large subfield within human-computer interaction research; several studies have shown benefits of having this embodiment for both ends [1-3].

Intuiting through it, how easy is it to tune out another flat planar video screen versus a tangible physical object moving around in your shared space?

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S107158191...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2157689.2157699

[3] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2559636.2559654

I'm skeptical. We used to have Beam telepresence robots in the office when I worked at Square. They were a novelty and people would try them soon after joining, but nobody used them. It was easier and more natural just to use Slack or video chat.

For now, sure, obviously it'll be more natural to use the mediums that are pervasive on commercially available devices that are backed by several industries-worth of engineers and developers, compared to some systems hacked together by handful of grad students in some lab somewhere or hardware startups in a very nascent stage. Hardware is hard, and these platforms are just beginning to explore the possible application spaces of which there is still a lot of research to be done. My personal view on many of these telepresence platforms is that they're basically roving tablets with limited embodied expressiveness and no manipulation capability, which are whole subfields of research in-and-of themselves, and that addressing these limitations will eke out more value of telepresence robots in the future. The point of research (ideally) shouldn't be an immediate VC-backable commercial application, but rather to explore possible futures viable 5-10+ years down the road.

Now these kids will be bullied for ever and called robokid all their life !! Let’s simply do things the way they were :D

Is this gonna be something like the Electric Monk from the Dirk Gently books?

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