Robot Breakout!
What If?
The year is 2022. It is August 7th. Students saunter back to school. ‘Drrriiinnngg!’ the school bell sounds electronically. The students casually stroll into their classrooms. But quickly they realize that things are not quite normal. Their beloved teachers have been replaced…. With ROBOTS!
We have spent the last thousand years replacing human labor with mechanical muscles. This has helped our economies grow and standards of living rise. But will mechanical minds actually replace human brain labor… in a school setting? Working with real-live human children? This sounds like an economic revolution!
In shock, the students sit down. Quieter than normal. The final bell rings and Sheila stumbles in two minutes late. Now, typically, a human teacher would sympathize with a middle school student finding her way into class on the first day of school. But for a robot - it is a binary decision (yes or no)... so Sheila was marked tardy on day one. Tyler responded, “Harsh, Dude!” and the Robot (Mr. Robot, the students quickly discovered) dictates, “Speaking without being called upon equals a five merit loss.” And the class promptly fell into line.
By lunch, the students shuffled around in a daze. A line of metal served the melancholy group until something went awry. All of a sudden one serving of strawberries was misplaced on the lunch tray. Then the next. And the next. Before long, hundreds of strawberries littered the floor. The assembly line of robots continued to pour strawberries incorrectly onto floor while the students began to laugh uncontrollably.
Later, in gym class, the ‘PE teachers’ attempted to get the human students to line up and synchronously perform jumping jacks, push-ups, and stretches. The students just stared at each other in disbelief.
After the first day of school, a small group of students huddled in the back workroom of room 17. Few people knew of this workroom. It was piled high with old materials, parts, and teacher’s manuals. It used to be the Robotics Class. It used to be where the Robotics club would meet to build and create awesome Robots. But now… this group would be figuring out how to dismantle the robots… and bring their teachers back!
Do you have what it takes to help this group of students? Can you solve the five challenges on these core robotic concepts and help return school back to normal: Robotics, Binary, Algorithms, Sensors, and Artificial Intelligence.