Kentucky Academy of Technology Education at Murray State Brings NAO to Western Kentucky

Parts of this post are borrowed from the WKMS coverage of KATE's latest technology endeavor, the NAO programmable robot. I include portions of the interview to ensure continued coverage of innovative and STEM-related topics which promote local efforts to integrate emerging technologies in education and entrepreneurship.

Kate Lochte and WKMS sat down with Dr. Robert Lyons, Ginny Kelly, and Dwayne Buchanan to discuss the introduction of emerging technologies within Primary and Secondary Education. The newest technology promoted by KATE (Kentucky Academy of Technology Education) is the NAO robot. NAO is a French-made programmable robot developed specifically for educating young minds - and perhaps older minds, too - in the field of robotics and programming.

The NAO, designed and built by Aldebaran, is programmable using a collection of images to move the robot through a set of behaviors. NAO can also be customized by students by learning C++ and create their own set of custom behaviors.

"This is the second year the NAO robot is utilized in the Kentucky Academy of Technology Education program. A middle school in Bullitt County was the first to conduct a trial run. Students were selected to already had an interest in computer programming to try the software and the robot. They took their learning experience to a nearby elementary school for a demonstration. Because of the interest in robots, students who were not necessarily leaders in the classroom stepped forward and became leaders in the project. Feedback shows that 80% of the kids in the trial had gone on to take another programming class in STEM." (WKMS; http://wkms.org/post/how-murray-state-introducing-kids-emerging-world-robotics; August 15th, 2014)

Ginny, Robert, and Dwayne also did a great job of incorporating Make and D-I-Y activities into their discussion.

Please listen to the entire interview at WKMS here.