NSF Awards: 2024882, 1932187, 2036870
2021 (see original presentation & discussion)
Undergraduate, Graduate, Adult learners, Informal / multi-age, All Age Groups
In robotics research, Baymax means soft robots, while Wall-E means mobile manipulators. How can we make those two famous sci-fi animation characters in the real world? And what research challenges are we facing? This video will show you our exciting experience combining STEM education with cutting-edge robotics and AI research.
Chen Feng
Assistant Professor
Hi All, thank you for watching this video, and welcome to check our lab website for more details of the projects: ai4ce.github.io
Semiha Ergan
This is great! Well done team!
Chen Feng
Assistant Professor
Thank you, Semiha!
Andres Colubri
Assistant Professor
Thank you for showing some of the work going on in your lab! The connection between real-world robots and sci-fi animated characters from popular movies could be very motivating for young learners to learn robotics. I initially got the impression that one of your goals might be to develop some of these prototypes into "soft" robots that middle or high school students could use as part of their programming & robotics classes at school, is this correct?
Chen Feng
Assistant Professor
Dear Andres,
Thank you for your questions. Yes, our goal is to do so. In fact we have already released the source code of our DeepSoRo project on GitHub. We still need some time to prepare a step by step readme file to help STEM educator to replicate the results. Maybe after this summer, the instructions will be online.
Meanwhile, if anyone is interested to try it out, feel free to ask questions in the GitHub project and we will be more than happy to help!
BTW, we have the same plan for the mobile 3D printing project also. That would happen next year.
I hope this helps.
Andres Colubri
Assistant Professor
Dear Chen, thanks so much for sharing the open source resources!
Michael Chang
Postdoctoral Research
Cool research projects! I can see some scenarios where the BayMax, Wall-E project could be used as a fun, relatable starting point for young people to think about AI and other topics. Could you elaborate on how you would imagine young people would learn from their interactions with your research projects? Do you envision some kind of long-term interaction with young people, where the research moves in lock step with the feedback from the youth (in either this project or others) ?
Chen Feng
Assistant Professor
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your questions. First, we hope to stimulate more interests and eagerness among young people on STEM so they know next time when they watch animations or sci-fi movies they might start thinking "hey, maybe this robot in the movie is not so far from me, and I myself could make it happen in real life, I just need to invest more time and effort in STEM, and it could even happen after I enter college".
Second, we hope to turn our research prototypes into STEM education kits (for example the Baymax and the Wall-E projects) so anyone interested could DIY at home. See my reply above to Andres.
Third, we do envision long-term interactions. Young people have lots of cool imaginations that we can learn from. I hope to get inspired by them and connect STEM research more closely with the general public. BTW, the Baymax demo was in fact inspired by our undergraduate student, Songyu Du, when she worked in my lab on the project. I think young people's ideas sometimes could really help researcher finding new directions or new way of presenting the research.
I hope this helps.
Jeremy Roschelle
Executive Director, Learning Sciences
These are nice examples, congrats on your video! I am wondering about your team... do you have some experts in learning or education? If you need to make some connections, our CIRCLS center would be happy to help you with some suggesting some from the RETTL/Cyberlearning community.
Chen Feng
Chen Feng
Assistant Professor
Dear Jeremy,
Thank you for asking and the suggestion! Currently, my lab has no expert in learning/education, it is just me and my PhD students converting our research projects for educational purposes, which is what we promised to NSF in our project proposal. Yes, it would be interesting to know more about the CIRCLS center and how it works. Let me read more about your center.
Jeremy Roschelle
Executive Director, Learning Sciences
Please do. It's at circls.org You would be quite welcome to come to the convening in September. It is like a PI meeting a bit -- but we don't serve just one particular program at NSF -- rather we find people doing future oriented work in AI and learning regardless of who funded them. It will be online and we are trying our best to make it a good networking event. There's an application in the newsletter.
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.