On January 18 at the annual Otronicon expo in the Orlando Science Center, UCF’s HCI Lab and CREATE teamed up with ROBOTIS to hold an inaugural teacher’s workshop for STEAM learning with robots (http://hci.cah.ucf.edu/roboticsworkshop). ROBOTIS is known globally for making stand outs in the field of robotics. In 2011, DARwIn-OP, the company’s open platform humanoid robot, won the RoboCup, an international robotics soccer competition. ROBOTIS is one of the DARPA Robotics Challenge finalists.
The workshop demonstrated the principles of robotic technology in a way that can be taught to elementary students through a STEAM curriculum. The HCI Lab’s Dr. Si Jung Kim, Dr. Stella Sung, Jessica Naimo, and Guilherme Bersani, joined Aaron Park, ROBOTIS Director, to facilitate the workshop. The ten participating local school teachers were guided through building a bug robot using one of the ROBOTIS OLLO series kits. It concluded with a demonstration of their new creations, having successfully added to the robot population.