Sean Tibor: Hello and welcome to teaching. And Python. My name is Sean Tiber. I'm a coder who teaches, and my. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Name is Kelly Schustercritis, and I'm a teacher who codes. Sean Tibor: This is episode 98. It's all about robots and education, and we have a special guest with us today to talk all about the different ways that we can incorporate robotics into the classroom. I want to welcome Alai inbar today welcome a lot. It's great to have you on the show. Elad Inbar: Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me. Sean Tibor: So a lot, you're the founder and CEO of Robot Lab, and we're going to get into some of the details about your company and the work that you've done. But I know Kelly and I have both worked with products that your company has helped us find and bring into the classroom. I'm looking forward to really great conversation about how we can bring computer science, robotics, engineering, problem solving. I guess the list could go on forever about all the benefits for the classroom, everything. Right. So we're excited to have you today. We're going to get started right away with the wins of the week, though. Kelly, sounds good to you? Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We have lots to talk about, so let's get it in and get it done. Sean Tibor: All right, well, a lot, we'll make you go first because that's kind of become our tradition on the show. To have a guest go first, would you please share with us a win of the week, something good that's happened in the classroom, in the office, outside of the office and the corner store, wherever it happens. Elad Inbar: Yeah, first thing that happens is Texas school down after these two months. But other than that, we just trained yesterday school here near Dallas, 13 teachers on narrow robot. How to program that. It's a small school, K 212. We had everything from three K teachers super excited to have a sidekick that can help them get the little guys running and stopping and playing and all of that just to get their curiosity about robotics and all the way to high school teachers that wanted to know all the ins and outs of Python and Java and how to actually make the robot connect to the Internet and everything. Which was really interesting crowd. And it was kelly really fun. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's so exciting. I think I'm going to try to bribe you to come to Florida, and maybe you can come to me. I want to have now play soccer. Elad Inbar: Yeah, we can do that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I have a lot of Spanish people, including my son, who absolutely loves soccer, and they keep saying, when is it going to chase the soccer ball? And I'm like, I'm getting there. Elad Inbar: Yeah. No, the answer should be you should program me. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes. I'm trying to get him excited about Python. He's a 6th grader, so I'm trying to get him excited about it. So we're working baby steps. Sean Tibor: It's often a little bit harder when your parent is the one that's also the teacher too. Either it's the best partnership because you have so much fun with it, or it's like, no, I don't want to touch that at all. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah. His friends are realizing how cool I am, and he's just like, yeah, whatever you want to go. Sean Tibor: Very good. The biggest win this week has really been about training and recruiting. So I've been working really hard on bringing in the next batch of interns next summer. It's never too early to start. And I just came back from a recruiting trip to a university here in Florida and just was wowed by the quality of the students, the excitement, the enthusiasm, the projects that they're working on. I think one of my favorite candidates I spoke with was working on visualizing interchip communications on some intel chips at one point, and she was visualizing the communication pathways, and she said, Well, I was using this Python library, and it just became too cluttered and messy. So I wrote my own that would generate my own SVGs. Like, nice. That's really cool. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: We should get her on the show. Sean Tibor: I'm working on it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's excellent. I had, like, a really cool Epiphany activity. My new teaching partner, we were talking about some activities, and she comes in one day, and we're doing dictionaries in Python, and we have flexibility in our curriculum, and she puts up this data from Broward County primary elections, and she says to the kids, this I can't read as a math teacher. This is horrible. Go sort it out. And the kids were writing functions and doing dictionaries, and I got to learn about the candidates in the Broward County primaries that I missed out on. That election person I am, but so a Kelly good win of the week with that. And the kids were doing some great things with some dictionaries, which was nice because that led right into a request library activity, looking at JSON and pulling apart the values from the website. So it was really fun, really good activity off the cusp. Sean Tibor: Nice. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And using real data, so that was a plus. Sean Tibor: Always works better when you bring things to life, right? Like bring the real world into the problem solving. Seems to go a long way. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Absolutely. Sean Tibor: And speaking of which, that kind of leads right into our next topic, into our main topic, because what better way to make computer science, electronics, mechanical engineering come to life than trying to mash it all together into a robot, right? Elad Inbar: Yeah, absolutely. Sean Tibor: So let me take a minute just to introduce you to people who may not know you. I may not know Robot Lab. I'll do my best here, and please fill in any gaps in my introduction. As I mentioned before, you founded and you're the CEO of Robot Lab. And the way I like to think of it is that you're the glue in between the people that find the right robots find the variety of different robotic solutions and connect that with a variety of different customers and clients like education, higher education, restaurants, hospitality, assisted living so basically being those connectors that bring the right products to the right customers and help assemble it. And I think I was telling Kelly, it feels like that might be the harder job than making the robots because you have to know about all of them and how to best meet that customer need. But especially for customers that may not know all there is to know about the robots that are out there, you play a key role in helping them understand what their options are, right? Elad Inbar: Yeah, absolutely. Now that I buy us or something but there is no other company like robot Club out there that is really platform or domestic. We care about the customers and what they need. So if you are a high school teacher that needs a python programming and you want to engage your students will offer a set of robots, a set of tools that can help you if you're elementary teacher will offer a different set of projects, if you are a university professor, will offer something different for you or just different program, different level of program. We care about the customer, the use cases, what they need. As you mentioned, it's not just education. The robots spread beyond education. By now we have robots in restaurants that deliver foods and hotels, go to the 17th floor and deliver to your room and the cleaning robots at hotels and sisters living facilities, it's all over the place and we want to show the students there is a pathway here. It's not just for the fun of playing with vex and project leads these kind of things. You can actually build a career out of it. Sean Tibor: It is really amazing how it's now become so widespread and even more so every day. I remember when I was in college a long time ago, we had a very strong robotics program at my school and I remember in the computer science building they would have a custombuilt robot that someone had that would wander around and it would interact with people and it was someone's PhD research project. But now I went to the restaurant down the street and had a bowl of noodles and they delivered it on a robot. To me, the future is here when it comes to robotics. Elad Inbar: Yeah, I mean this is the best for many many years we used to say career and college readiness and all of that. We are there, the careers are there, we are hiring. I'm having a hard time finding qualified employees. There isn't demanding. It's growing exponentially these days. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I would love to talk a whole nother episode about doing the careers and looking at the student in the future but I'll stop myself because I get too excited about some things. So tell us about some of your most favorite robots that you bring into the K Twelve environment. Elad Inbar: Now, by far. Personally, I'm working with now robots for over a decade. I would say twelve years since 2009. We partnered with the back then, it was a neighbor on robotics that manufactured them. We're bringing them to the US. We created curriculum, lesson plans, activities, courses for them. As of today, we are managing around 6200 now out there in both north and Latin America. So we're talking about schools in Mexico, in Peru. You name it, we have it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Who in Peru has it? Elad Inbar: I don't remember the top of my head. I used to know all my customers. I don't remember that anymore. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That one you have to come back, because I used to work in Roosevelt and lived there, so I'm going to have to investigate competition. Elad Inbar: Yeah, we have universities and schools and really love now because of the versatility and the way that even now, twelve years after the first version came to the market, every time you bring it to the costume, the first time, kids see it just like, Whoa, what is that? And you get them hooked. That's what we need as educator. That's what we are looking for. That inspiration moment, that hook that actually opened all the curiosity doors. And once the curiosity door is open, then we can teach them whatever we need. And this is my personal passion, to see that moment. And then, as you mentioned before, we can go play soccer. Where is the ball? What's the angle that we need to kick the ball at? Oh, we need to solve Pythagorean theorem for that. Okay, fine, let's do that. Now I have a motive to actually go about that as a student. Practice the math practice, physics practice, three coding, programming, it doesn't matter what. It's actually such a versatile platform. Until today, this is still the best one out there. I'm not familiar with anything that's even getting close to that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, I fell in love. The men and I took now out of the package. And I was telling Sean the whole time I had it at home during the summer, and I couldn't get past autonomous life because I just wanted to have conversations with this thing. I was sending videos of now doing tai chi, and I was just like, oh, my gosh, the Servos. Can you imagine all the parts in here and just the excitement of that? It's just a brilliant bot just in basic life for listeners out there. It's a humanoid robot. And if you don't know what a humanoid robot is, you can ask now. And now we'll tell you what a humanoid is. And now we'll even tell you all three rules of Asimov. And if there's one more extra rule of Asimov, which I learned and I did not know, which I thought was brilliant, and just going to the fact that this robot can teach at a basic autonomous life with 200 300 plus conversation pathways that you can go through. Although I haven't got into the French, I would love to get the language in there so I can take them into the French classroom to see how well their French is. Elad Inbar: Actually, one of the interesting things is going back to the versatility of the platform is in the autonomous life, most of them are pre scripted. You have to be very precise about what you ask, and they're always answered the same thing. But we've seen the project and we also connected to Alexa, to Google dialogflow. This opens the entire knowledge base of Alexa and Google and everything. You can ask any questions about anything. It starts to be closer to what we've seen in the movies for all these years. Sean Tibor: Well, I have a question because it's really fun to talk about now in the coding space. Maybe let's start earlier on, because I know we've had some teachers that have come to us and said, it's great that you're talking about teaching Python or teaching robotics at a high school level or university level, but what could I do for my students because I'm teaching kindergarteners and second graders and third graders. How have you seen now used or robotics in general, used with children that young? What are some of the goals that you're seeking for students at that age to get from interacting and using robots in education? Elad Inbar: Yeah, so when it comes to computer science, unlike math, for example, if you're talking to a 7th grader, you expect some knowledge because they finished the 6th grader math and they finished the fifth grader math and they finished the fourth grader. So there should be some knowledge if you are a 7th grader. If you're a greater or not, that's a different question. But there should be something there. When it comes to computer science, there is no basic knowledge. The standards don't require that. By fourth grade, everyone will know what a function or loop or if else is. So in a way, when we talk about computer science the first time, it doesn't really matter if you are in elementary school or in your high school, you have no idea what computer science is. We recommend for most of our teachers to start with storytelling. We have a curriculum around storytelling. It's a short course. It's ten different lessons in this lesson. In this course, we basically take them through the basic concepts. So first, just make the road. Say something. It doesn't stand, doesn't do anything. Then add some LEDs, add some sensors. So you touch this, you touch that. It reacts differently later on. Add some if and else. And don't just add even else, only with code. But use text to speech and speech to text. So let's say you have a story and I don't know the big bad wolf, right? You can actually fork the story into two different endings based on the input from the listener. So we take them every lesson a little bit deeper into programming by working on something that is totally independent from that. We are talking about storytelling, so talking about characterization, how do you set the environment setting and all of that, so as they work on that, they actually program as well. And it doesn't matter if you're a second grader or 10th grader, because if you never saw computer science or programming or robots, it's the same. You're at the same level. You might be able to pick it faster if you're a 10th grader, but you're still at the same level. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I tend to find out that the middle schoolers pick it up faster altogether than the 10th graders. But that's so true. That's so true. That's what amazes a lot of people sometimes about the things that Sean and I used to do in the classroom. We would have ten year olds coding because even if they had seven years of scratch, it's still something that you can do when you're at a solid level. I sent the 8th graders, I gave them choreograph and I said, Go figure it out. And they had it doing all kinds of stuff and they weren't afraid of it. So it is quite impressive. Elad Inbar: They'll figure it faster than most of the teachers, to be honest. They're curious because they just drag this box, let's do this, let's connect that and see what it does, and they figure it out really, really fast. Sean Tibor: I think that's part of the magic, too, is it's really hard to truly break it. You can experiment, you can have things go wrong. You can see what happens. And I think that's one of the reasons why younger students in particular tend to do well is that we look at this and we say, oh, this is a very expensive robot. We must be very careful with it. We can't do anything wrong. We must read the manual before we do anything. Elad Inbar: We can't do it. Sean Tibor: And then you have next to you a ten or eleven year old going, I wonder what happens if I connect this and this and this and oh, that didn't work, let me try this instead. They aren't thinking about those same things. They're not trained the same way we are to think about it. Elad Inbar: There is also another aspect. I mean, you're right, but there is another aspect for that. I heard it from one of the supernets, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago. And she told me that every time they introduced a generation to robotics and everything, all the kids are super engaged. And she was really curious about that, and she started interviewing the kids, what's in it? Then she came to the conclusion that if you start to think about a child's life, everything is dictated for them. When to wake up, what to dress, when to eat, what to eat. They have zero control over their lives. Zero. Absolutely nothing. Maybe you can change the channel on the TV, but that's about it. And even then, some of the scream go back. But when you put them in front of the robot, they are the master and the robot is a slave. The robot is doing whatever they say. So it's just like rewiring their brains in a way that they never thought possible because their entire life is dictated by someone else. This is something I didn't realize it until she said it to me, but I can clearly see that's why kids are so excited about that. Let's connect everything. Let's see what he thought about the robot. And it's all about the curious. It's like, what's the limit of my power over that being that's kind of like, where she took it. And I see that. I clearly see that. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: That's awesome. Elad Inbar: Yeah. Sean Tibor: I think it reminds me a lot of that whole idea of having, like, a box of Legos and a Saturday morning to build whatever you want. Elad Inbar: Right. Sean Tibor: And the only real limit is your imagination. So if we have this robot there and I think the other thing that really strikes me about the now is the fact that it's anthropomorphic, that it's humanoid, that it's friendly, that it engages its familiar, makes it much more engaging and interactive and fun for the students. If it was a robot octopus, it might be a little less friendly. Right. Especially if it was all sticky and gooey and everything. But that humanoid aspect makes it friendly, it makes it engaging, and they can imagine themselves where they can translate their perspective or their point of view to the robot. I want to make it raise its right arm. Well, I have a right arm. How do I do that? So there's a lot of connective pieces between the design of the robot and the way it's programmed and their curiosity. That makes a lot of sense in terms of the way kids engage with it. Elad Inbar: Yeah. One of the things you mentioned, also elementary and higher grades. One of my favorite lessons is asking the student, I'm sure you also have the robots standing up because it's like, grandpa. If the listeners don't know what you're talking about, just Google. Now robots stand up and just click on video. You'll see standing up like, your grandpa really needs support everywhere. But then we ask the students, Why did they do that? Oh, so it won't fall. Why would it fall? Oh, now we start talking about center of gravity and the support base and all of that. And one of my favorite lessons is, okay, let's try you're the student. Let's try to program the robot to stand in a different way. Okay. So they say, oh, that's easy. We can do that. We just stand up, right? And we just stretch up and stand. And then they try and it doesn't work because the role doesn't have muscles, it has motors, and it needs support. We can hold ourselves beyond the support, basically, of muscle. And then they like, oh, it doesn't work. Five minutes into that, everyone is on the floor with a paper and pen and trying to record exactly the motion that they are doing and how they support themselves. And they record that, and then they program the robot to do that. And this connects everything. It connects physical universe, my body, my robot's body, the center of gravity. I understand forces on myself. And now I translate that to code. I translate that to a machine that needs to mimic that. So this kind of Bridget is very, very unique, which is, you won't find it in a robot on wheels. You won't find it on any other robot. And again, it's connected to our value. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: It's a very personal experience that's 100% true. It's like giving me flashbacks of our last episode that we just released about bringing out different curricula and how these things can apply. But the idea of you have physics, you have math, and I love it when now falls. And I was like, Oopsie, I fall down or something. And the fact that I can just see a bunch of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders lying on the floor trying to get up and only being able to move in the direction of their servos on their arms and the legs. How do you guys go about training your teachers? One, do you have teachers that come in from other curriculum, not necessarily Stem that would use now? And how do you help to promote that? Because I just love the idea of getting out of the CS classroom and talking about physics, physiology, movement, storytelling, all these great things that are not necessarily CS focused. Elad Inbar: Yeah. So most of the training we live in 2022, so most of the training is done online using zoom. Typically, we don't teach Python per se. We expect the teachers to know how to program with Python. We show them how to bridge the APIs and the SDK and everything that we have for now, with their knowledge of Python. If they don't know Python, that's perfectly fine. We can teach them through choreograph, all the basic programming and all of that. So programming is, again, done mostly online. We used to have workshops in our office in California, and then it threw arrangements on everyone plan, so we're not doing it anymore. So that's on the programming side. Now, on the different age groups, it really depends on different disciplines. It really depends on what they are trying to achieve. And this is, again, something that we are very tuned to. So we're asking our teachers, okay, you're not a computer science teacher. Okay. What are you trying to achieve? Well, I'm an English teacher in that way. Okay, great. Do you have Spanish speakers? Yes, I do. Okay, let's work on vocabulary. Let's work on this, and we can create all these programs and we show the teachers how to create that so she can focus on the core of whatever she needs to teach the students, but do that through the robot. So it really doesn't matter what you mentioned, storytelling or language or math or you name it, you can bring everything through this robot. It sounds like a magical catchall kind of thing. It's not magical. It needs creativity. It needs attention from the teachers in order to actually bring it to that, because we don't know your reality. You might be a Spanish teacher, and today you're working on vocabulary, and tomorrow you're working on grammar. We don't have that content. You have the content. We just show you how to put your knowledge and your passion through the. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Robot to the students using the tool to teach the content, something that we always say. So the tool is irrelevant. It's the content and the teacher who brings out the passion through the tool. I should say, yeah, pretty cool, but Sean's got deep. Sean's got a lot of thoughts going. Sean Tibor: On that I'm thinking about. There's a couple of thoughts that come to mind. Definitely the anthropomorphic nature opens up a lot of doors, right? You can have someone very easily say, well, I like doing this thing with my body. I want to try to get the robot to do it. Or one of my favorite things to do is to tell stories or jokes. I'm going to program now to tell jokes. The thing that was interesting to me, and I think one of the reasons why robotics as a tool and now in particular helps so much is really around you start with the thing that you want to do. You start with that idea, the content, the lesson, the project, whatever it is, and then you have to go find the right academic support for that or the right task or the thing to learn in order to make it happen. It strikes me that that's a very, very modern approach to the way that we work preparing students for tomorrow, most of tomorrow and today really is, I have this thing that I want to go do now. What do I need to go learn in order to do it, or what can I take from my own knowledge and apply it? So that idea that you mentioned earlier around, I want to get it to play soccer, so I have to apply some math and some physics, and I have to think about vision and how I see things like that gives students and educators a whole list of things that they can learn as part of doing this project. And it doesn't feel like you're working at it. It doesn't feel like you're putting in that effort. And curious if you have some examples of projects that were particularly effective or interesting or your shortlist of what kinds of novel projects were out there that really drove that learning. But in a way that didn't feel like work? Elad Inbar: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm saying it all the time. We are almost a quarter of a century into the 21st century, so it's about time we teach them 21st century skills. Now, what are the 21st century skills? So everyone decided the same thing. So problem solving this and that's fine, but what does it actually mean? We have a team here. You mentioned our support or our customer support and customer success. We call them internally. We call them internally. The McGivers. So we all know the TV show, right? McGuire so he can solve problems with a paper clip and whatever. So that's the approach in our industry today. We live in a world without user manuals. We have here at our office with three robots that I see that are brand new. We're not released yet. We are giving feedback to the manufacturers on what works, what doesn't work, what needs to be improved, change and so on. Software, hardware, or whatever. We need to figure it out. There is no user manual. The cycle of innovation in the world in general is not just accelerated, is accelerating. Look at your phone. I mean, ten months ago, this was the latest and greatest, and ten months later, it's an obsolete drink, and you already have to upgrade that. That's the nature of things. The same with everything around us, your laptop, the car, you name it. Probably, I don't know, maybe probably the spoons and these kind of things stay the same. But even the dishwasher is changing rapidly all the time. This is something that we need to prepare the kids to their future. Having this ability to solve problems and improvise and find a path where there is no path. It's all uncharted land. This is something that robots and robotics and coding and all of that really prepare them, because otherwise they won't succeed in this world. Because this world is not structured. It's not the word that was when we were kids. Everything was planned. You go to this company, you work for 40 years, and you get your retirement and you live happily ever after. It doesn't exist anymore. Sean Tibor: The other thing that is really a 21st century trait, as Kelly, is that we really do stand on the shoulders of giants all the time. I was reading an article the other day that was comparing the computing power of the original Crayone supercomputer. Not only does my Apple Watch have it beat in terms of computing power, it's by orders of magnitude. It is just massively outstripped, which is by itself the hardware. The technology is a miracle to miniaturize that and to scale it up. But in addition to that, it's all the software that goes into it. It's all of the libraries that have been written, the code that's been built and tested over the course of the 40 or 50 years since that crate came out that lets you. Use that computing power. So if you were to transport my apple watch back in time to the 1970s when the craig came out, it'd be a useful toy, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it. Right, because they don't have that built up knowledge and understanding. So one of the things that I think has really turned into a modern skill is being able to leverage work that other people have done in new and interesting ways. So taking all of that amazing work that's been put into the now is hardware and software and engineering, and use that to tell jokes is kind of a miracle of the 21st century. Right. The fact that you can do that and the fact that a third grader can do that really shows how far we've come since the days of the cray one in the 1970s. Elad Inbar: It's not just the robotics. And take a look at the platform that we are using now to talk, okay? Streaming video over the internet in a browser that uses jquery, which is built on JavaScript, which is built on mozilla, which is built on just so many layers. And we just forget this is the same as our health. We assume it's always there until we don't have it, and it's like, oh, what happened to my health? The same here. You miss one program, DLL, right? This stack, and nothing works. Robots bring it very clearly to life. I mean, messed one little flex cable inside, and that's it. The robot cannot stand anymore. This is because it's connected. It's all based on input from other companies inside. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: For me, working with robots has been a lifesaver, especially being an exploratory robot, because we have two programs, exploratory and competition. And I do exploratory. I feel, as the CS educator, as a person, that's not sort of your background or sean's background. It's very daunting. But when you put a robot out there, you have this really big superhero power that can help build these bridges from people like me who don't have that CF background. And coming into the classroom, how have you seen other teachers? I'm trying to think of it just like, feeling that power. I don't know if you kind of understand what I'm saying, but you get so empowered from these bots of, oh, well, you know, I know a lot about education here, let this bot happen. Have you seen any of your curriculum, or have you gotten any great ideas of your curriculum from that kind of power? Elad Inbar: Yes, absolutely. I heard it from many, many other teachers that everyone has a smartphone, everyone has a tablet, everyone has a computer. People are playing with that. And many people, many parents are paying for after school activities, teaching, coding, teaching JavaScript, gaming, these kind of things. But no one has now, when you bring now, you put it on the table in front of the students, they have no choice but be silent and listen to you because they don't know it. They don't have an afterschool program. And we actually had an after school program with Champions, but it's long gone. There are no after school programs with that. You never saw it. There is no way you know anything about it. So it basically brings the teacher back to the folks, okay, please teach me. Please. I mean, I'm listening. I want to play with this thing. Sean Tibor: I think the other thing that's empowering about it, too, for teachers is that with robotics in particular, you can come from so many different backgrounds where you can see something off of perspective. Sure, there's a bit of a base expectation around coding, but let's say you're a physics teacher. Let's say you're an engineer. You can look at it one perspective. Let's say you're an English teacher. You can look at it with a different perspective. You can bring something to bear as a teacher that helps shape the experience for the students, and that injects that sort of personality of the teacher into the curriculum, into the lessons that you create. One of the things I always thought with Kelly and I was fascinating to watch us teach the exact same concept, but from two totally different perspectives. So that's where I think now is. And robotics in a more general sense is really empowering for teachers because every teacher should feel like there is some way for them to use a tool like this to teach their content, to teach their ideas better. You could take now into a dance classroom, into a dance studio and teach dance with me. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You should see this thing move. Elad Inbar: Actually, we had a program with Austin ISD two programs. Sorry. One is the robotic idol where they actually program the robot to dance, and the other one was a robot fashion show where they had to program the road to walk the catwalk. We partnered with the textile department at UT Austin, and they basically just created all the costumes and everything, both of them. You bring physics, you bring dancer, you bring kinematics. You can't move too fast for your hands backwards because there will flip over. You have to maintain the balance. So if you reach out on one side, you have to lean a little bit to the left side, to balancing. We don't think about that. But once you start experimenting, programming and everything, students just have to pull knowledge from different disciplines in order to make their creation come to life. It doesn't matter if it's a catwalk or dance or whatnot. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: You just made me very happy because I got stuck and I'm doing air quotes. I got stuck with a club, which I didn't know what I was getting into, but I was really happy to hear these kids lead, and they're doing upcycling clothes and using inspiration from the sean. So now it's going to be our model. I'm so excited. I've got to teach them how to walk down the catwalk. I'm so excited. That brings me a great point because I know we have a lot of artistic focused students that do not really connect right away with coding, with a computer screen. They don't get all nerded out like Sean and I do. When I look at graphs and he messes with hardware, bringing in this and having that humanoid feature, it just opens the door to a lot other disciplines. And that's really exciting. I don't have a question for that. Elad Inbar: I just had to just on that. We've seen in many, many schools the typical, the usual suspect, right, for robotics or coding students will be white, male, Asian. That's the usual suspect. We want to attract more kids to these classrooms. What we've seen through these programs like robotic idol, like the fashion show and so on, that it attracts more girls. They want to program the robot to dance. They are all about music and everything. And again, there's nothing good about just the way that we are wired differently. But what you've seen is because the girls are there now, more guys want to come in because, hey, the girls are there and they're cool. Now I need to be there too. So it just opens this cycle that introduces robotics and coding and everything to more and more populations inside the school. It just opens doors that otherwise would be interesting to them to open. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: I love that. Elad Inbar: Nice. Sean Tibor: Well, why don't we shift gears a little bit and talk about how would you get started? So let's say you're an educator, you've been listening to the show, and you're getting excited about the possibilities. I have five ideas that come up with on the show right now that I want to go play with. How does someone get started with now? What are they looking at in terms of funding to be able to get started? Time investment. I mean, it's not just the money. You have to be willing to commit your time and energy to it as well. Elad Inbar: Yeah. So when it comes to cost, most of the schools are purchasing that from various grants. Very few have a robotics line item in their budget. So you can go to your principal on the robotics line item next year on that, unfortunately. But that's where we live. There are grants available from either local government or local businesses. Many teachers are using Gofadmik and these type of platforms, so they raise funds from the local community, from parents and local businesses and so on. There are endless ways to go about that. We are very flexible when it comes to supporting teachers and funding sources. To give you an example, many teachers will tell us, oh, I have $2,000 on that grant and five on that grant and three on that. So how do I buy a robot? I can't put all of them together in one basket. I need different invoices and we do that. We provide one invoice for now head, one invoice for now hand and another one for torso and leg. They apply to different things and they get a robot, but each one gets its own. So again, we are trying to be creative and support the teachers because funding is always an issue and we are totally aware of that. When it comes to the cost, we have two versions for that. The one is the current version, now V Six. So v six is the last iteration. It implies that there were six versions before, which is true. We have V six AI edition. We added a lot of AI capabilities to the robots. We connected to chatbot to Google dialogflow, added a real life simulator so we can simulate physics in choreography. The torso that comes with the robot, you can see the robot moving, but the torso is kind of fixed and mostly the arms and head moving around torso, so there is no physics. You can't make the road fall or something like that. So we partnered with another company that create simulators for robots. We added real world simulations. The prices are between twelve zero and fourteen zero. That's the two different versions. It comes with one year warranty. Of course you can extend that later on. So this is when it comes to the purchase and how to go about getting that funded. And if you're lucky and you have a line item in your school budget for robotics, you're awesome. When it comes to the time commitment. For people that are passionate about that, this is like a black hole. You don't need to say it. I mean, people just start working on that and before you know it's, 02:00 A.m. It's so much fun. I have the best job in the world. I mean, I'm playing with robots, everything. Sean Tibor: I call that the time travel effect. So you're really selling time travel? I can move forward 6 hours without even playing. Elad Inbar: Exactly. And you'll do that tomorrow. Again, because it's so much fun. So yes, it requires time, but it's not the Tedious Read 1000 pages history book or something like that. And you have to read that to understand it comes by doing. And the moment you turn on the robot, the moment you start connecting boxes, figuring it out, one thing led to another and before you know it, you spend 6 hours. Sean Tibor: I want to add one component to this that I think a lot of teachers overlook sometimes, or may not come to mind first. There's also that loop that connects back. So if you have a grant that you've gotten for the robot, or you have paredes who want to know what their kids are learning in school all day, one of the benefits of robotics is that it's really much more visible to the grant funders, to the parents, to the administrators, that the kids are engaged, they're interacting, they're learning something because they can see the robot there. So trying to explain, yeah, we did a cloud software tutorial is really hard because it just looks like another computer screened in a web page. But a robot is something that very visual. So there is a little bit of the practical kind of business mindset around being able to show your grant funders or show your paredes, show your administration what's happening, which has practical benefits for getting the support that you want. But there's also an academic piece to this that's really important as well, which is your students, your learners can go show someone else, look at this thing that I did. I got the robot to dance. I program that. Elad Inbar: I did that. Sean Tibor: That connection to it is much more visible with a robot than it is with almost anything else in computer science. Maybe hardware, I made the light blank or I made the motor move or I did those things. But this is the next level of that. And I wanted to call that out as something to remember after you go time travel, remember to show people what you're doing because they're really going to get excited about it and want to do more of it. And that applies equally to the learners as well as to the other people that are supporting the program. Elad Inbar: And by the way, time travel will happen to students as well, not just to you. They'll stay after school and they keep working on that and. Sean Tibor: They feel like the bells are 30 seconds apart. They came in the bell ring and then 30 seconds later ranks again and. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: They'Re done absolutely have a very hard time kicking them out of my classroom. My teaching partner is always commenting about all of my beeps and bops of all the bots that we have in there and now is in the corner. And every time she speaks up, it turns its head and looks at her and she's just like, why is it looking at me? Sean Tibor: Because we programmed it. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Wait till I have it come after you. Elad Inbar: Yeah. Sean Tibor: So we spent a lot of time talking about now. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the other exciting robots that you're working with? Anything cool and interesting that's maybe brand new or it doesn't have to be limited to education, but just to give our listeners something to get excited about and think about how this connects with the world around them. Elad Inbar: Yeah. So in the education space, we are really excited about what we call AI labs, which takes the whole concept of artificial intelligence, robotics coding and everything and put it into a lab. This is, again, something that we learned at the beginning. People just send me the robot, they'll send me the box, I'll figure it out, I don't need anything. Then they get it. It's like, oh, I need to write code for that. Oh, I need to write my lesson. Plans for that. Oh, I need to do this. So they forget it, they just don't touch it. Then we started providing the curriculum, the lesson plans and everything. This was great. But then, okay, I finished the curriculum. Now what? How do I take my students to the next level? They are fast, right? And they are running through three courses in a semester. How do I keep engaging them? And this is where we came with the AI lab concept where basically we take a room at the school and we create multiple AI stations. So one can be humane robot interaction, another one can be 40, another one autonomous cars, smart cities and so on and so on. With spaces Exploration, they're building a model of the Curiosity Rover that NASA sent to Mars. So all of these creates a space and I think I wanted so all of this create a space that allows multiple learners from multiple age groups to keep advancing as they keep graduating from one to another. So this is something that we're really really passionate about in the school environment. And when it comes to outside of school industry, robots in hospitality is a big thing right now, especially due to the pandemic. We have hard time, I mean hotels or restaurants and so on, having hard time finding even when they find a place, they are having a hard time retaining them. We have many restaurant owners that said that people showed up and worked a couple of hours and just took off their apprentice. I'm done, thank you. Don't pay me for these 2 hours. I don't want this job. I don't know if people just got lazy or everyone wants to work remote now or I don't know what the story is. We hear that across the country from everyone. So robots that help serve food, help bus tables, help do room service, even I forgot my toothbrush. Can you send me two more soap or shampoo or towels or whatever? All of these require people to walk miles and miles per day. And these are mundane tasks that should be done by robots. The same with cleaning, especially in the hospitality cleaning hotels, they have miles of carpets that they need to clean every single day, okay? No one should work again a quarter of a century into the 21st century. No one should push a vacuum cleaner for 5 hours a day. These jobs should not exist. And yet we are hiring, I mean, hospitality industry hiring for that position. And obviously people don't want to do that. So that's where we see great structure and growth coming from. Sean Tibor: Yeah, it's a really exciting time because we are starting to achieve that potential. We've looked at that automation curve and there was an inflection point, the industrial age, where we took a lot of tasks and made them industrial. And we're now entering the robotics age. And I think this is another inflection point. It will be interesting to see how disruptive that is that this does disrupt the economy in a lot of ways but I think to your point in ways we probably need ways that are valuable to individuals. To people to help them have more fulfilling. More interesting jobs and careers it's a. Elad Inbar: Good distraction when we work with hotel owners as an example we tell them you don't need to fire the janitor you just need to change the title instead of being a janitor now you are a fleet manager okay? You manage a fleet of robots around different areas of your facility and you don't need to fire the person because you still need someone to go after the robots make sure they are charged. Clean them. Empty the dust. Sean and so on and so on so we changed the job description you can still maintain the same people so it's not really taking people's job I know many people are afraid of these kind of things I mean you are firing everyone but the world went through multiple multiple iterations of that from the invention of the printing press to the invention of the cars and the invention of the airplane travel and so on there are many industries that were decimated quote unquote but they actually transitioned not decimated yes there were many people providing a lot of services around horses in the early nineteen hundred s okay when cars came on they were all unemployed but no. They just transitioned to service cars instead of servicing horses sorry no. Go ahead now the same thing is happening now I mean janitors are being promoted in a way to manage fleet. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Of robots that the whole trickle down into education and at this point in time this is when my educational reform hat goes on and I'm like this is why we're doing what we're doing and teaching the skills that we're doing and why we're focusing on constant change and looking at how we can improve the life and yada yada yada and I can go on I love that it heightens the need to develop the skills and to allow the kids to investigate into unknown and to figure out where in the world can we help to improve the lives whether it's taking away a job now but maybe improving another job later so that's what I love about robots and CS so there's my plug for the evening I feel like it's a Friday night we don't have to go to work Wednesday and Thursday because the hurricane sorry well. Sean Tibor: Those of us who don't work from home oh yeah. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Well. Sean Tibor: A lot I want to be respectful of time and I know we've been having a wonderful chat here if people want to learn more about Robot Lab or learn more about what you're doing specifically whether it's on social media or an upcoming talk where could they best connect with you and with Robot. Elad Inbar: Lab so robot website is a natural place to robotlab.com. You'll find everything over there. You can go by different verticals. So education, higher education, K Twelve if it's on social media, on most of the platforms, we are Robot Lab Inc. Robot was one of the universities that took it and we never released it, but that's fine. We are Robot Lab Inc. On most of the social media platforms, facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. You can follow us over there if you want. Talk to me directly. My email is elad elad@robot.com. I'm available for anyone that needs help, consultation, jokes, whatever it is. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: And I can guarantee that the tech support, the tech, what are they? What do you call them? Tech team met tech MacGyver. They are onspot and they always answer my silly questions. I'm not a person normally to do tech help, but because they respond so quickly, I'm like, oh, I'm going to email them. So they're great. Elad Inbar: Yeah, we're trying again, that's why we call them customer success, because we are trying to make sure that you succeed. If you succeed, you're a great advocate, you're great brand ambassador. And we are happy. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yeah, we're happy to with no, well, a lot. Sean Tibor: Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Now I want to go build robot stuff and code things to move and dance and tell stories and jokes for us. If you'd like to continue the conversation with Kelly and myself, our website is teachingpython. FM. You can email us there. We are also at teaching Python on Twitter. Kelly, we're coming up on episode 100 very soon. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Yes, and I am soon to put out. We are going on a live stream and we're hoping to get some pastime visitors, some current visitors, some future visitors to come in and join us and give us something to talk about. Maybe 100 tech tips on python. I don't know, 100 robots, 100 something. Sean Tibor: Well, a lot. We'll definitely send you along the information. Maybe you can join in and share some python and robot knowledge with us on that 100th episode. Again, thank you again for joining us. It's been wonderful to have you and we look forward to future conversations. Elad Inbar: Thank you, guys. You're doing great job. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: Thank you. Elad Inbar: Thanks. Sean Tibor: So for teaching Python. Kelly Schuster-Paredes: This is Sean, this is Kelly signing off. You. You.