TeRK, which stands for Telepresence Robot Kit, is a project of the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Our aim with TeRK is to make educational robotics fun, affordable, and accessible to a diverse community of college students, pre-college students, and all individuals interested in robotics. TeRK builds upon the success of our previous project, the Personal Rover Project.
In order to make robotics more accessible the TeRK web site provides “recipes” or instructions for some simple robots. All of the recipes can be built with off-the-shelf parts. Once you choose and build a recipe, you can turn the robot on and it will automatically search for a wireless network and connect to the Internet. You can then drive the robot around from any computer with a web browser and Internet connection. You can control your robot from anywhere, even when you and the robot are not in the same place. The TeRK web site provides free software for use with the TeRK robots, and all of our software is open-source so you can modify it or write your own programs to control your robot as well.
BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
Between 2001 and 2005 the Personal Rover Project designed robots, processor boards and educational curriculum for the real world. We have taken these products to both formal learning venues, from middle school to college, and informal learning centers, including the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Japan World Expo. Over 200,000 children and adults have interacted directly with our robots, and formal educational evaluations of the resulting learning, conducted by University of Pittsburgh’s UPCLOSE/LRDC, have yielded statistically significant results in the area of gender retention, identification with technology, and lifelong-learning skills acquisition:
- Girls entered coursework with lower confidence with technology, but were not discouraged and in fact gained confidence more quickly than boys, even in the context of robot programming challenges.
- Significant gains in teamwork, problem-solving, identification with technology and specifics of mechanism and computation—all key STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) issues.
- In museum samples, 71% of girls and 61% of boys at the exhibit engaged with collaborative robot exploration.
- In museum samples, 98% of users continued using the robot for several minutes, conducting a complete robotic exploration.
Our results to date have demonstrated that robotics is up to the task of playing a pivotal role in curriculum: robot reliability and richness of interaction has reached an important breakaway point in the curve of this relatively recent technology. Our results have also demonstrated that robots serve as a compelling tool for education both at college and pre-college levels, bolstering critical gender retention chances and facilitating lifelong learning. Given the timely discussion of STEM gaps and technology illiteracy today, the effective role of robots in education offers an encouraging sign of hope in stemming today’s trends.
Consider the most recent wave of technology breakthroughs: high-speed ARM microprocessor technology at never before seen price points; ARM-FPGA proofs-of-concept for robot control demonstrated in the national BotBall contest; USB Camera functionality / price points and custom board and chassis prototyping facilities now available.
We know robotics is an educational home run, and these technological advancements mean that today’s technological leading edge, if used to design new robot kits, new robot processor boards and new infrastructure for robot connectivity, can lead to the introduction of educational robots with more capability and a lower price than we have seen in the community before.
We intend to create the new class of robot and processor board that can trigger a small revolution in the role of educational robotics, and we intend to facilitate the birth of a community of users that will give educational robotics a healthy and rapidly growing life of its own.
