Who did NOT see this coming?
Last Tuesday, a truck dropped off a Yang Ming shipping container, and set it right outside of Spellings Hall. It sat there all week. Nobody opened it up. Nobody told us what was in it. It was all a total mystery. Today, we found out what was inside. Robots! Very real-looking robots! Four of them, all identical and all female!
Superintendent Kim Chee, it her quest to totally demoralize the faculty here at Camp Nickleby, decided to try using robots to teach the classes here. Teachers would only have a secondary role in the classroom. Considering we don’t get to really educate kids anymore, just train them through rote learning to fill in the correct bubbles on a standardized
test, she thought robots could do the work of highly-qualified teachers, and do it on the cheap!
Digging a little deeper into the story, one of our counselors discovered that Chee has a cousin back in Seoul, South Korea who works as an engineer for the Korean Institute for Industrial Technology (KITECH). They designed these robots, known as Robotic Interface Learning Facilitators (RILF). The Korean-made RILF teaching android is capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face. RILF also recognizes 400 words and can hold a basic verbal exchange, the minimum requirement for most public school high school teachers forced to teach to the test.
"The robot can serve to provide information in department stores and museums or read stories to children; it’s capable of both education and entertainment functions," said KITECH engineer Sum Young Dong, part of the team that created the RILF, and Chee’s cousin.
Dong says the android, which has the face and body of a woman in her 20s, is 160 cm tall and weighs 50 kg. RILF can move its upper body and “express” happiness, anger, sadness, petulance, sarcasm, pleasure and unbearable snarkiness. But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half (kinda reminds me of my college days in the 70s). RILF-2, which is set to go into production by 2014 (NCLB’s deadline) will have improved vision and ability to express emotions and can sit or stand. It will also feature an optional plug-in Obsequiousness Module, making it totally adaptable to administrative work.
According to a 2004 report by the International Federation of Robotics, Korea ranked 6th in the world in terms of robot market size and 5th in the number of robots used. The government aims to grow the industry to among the world’s top three by 2013 with a global market share of 15 percent, and it expects that, with the ever-increasing demand for docile, lobotomized, non-union teachers in the United States, teaching robots will certainly be the wave of the future.
Last Tuesday, a truck dropped off a Yang Ming shipping container, and set it right outside of Spellings Hall. It sat there all week. Nobody opened it up. Nobody told us what was in it. It was all a total mystery. Today, we found out what was inside. Robots! Very real-looking robots! Four of them, all identical and all female!
Superintendent Kim Chee, it her quest to totally demoralize the faculty here at Camp Nickleby, decided to try using robots to teach the classes here. Teachers would only have a secondary role in the classroom. Considering we don’t get to really educate kids anymore, just train them through rote learning to fill in the correct bubbles on a standardized
test, she thought robots could do the work of highly-qualified teachers, and do it on the cheap!Digging a little deeper into the story, one of our counselors discovered that Chee has a cousin back in Seoul, South Korea who works as an engineer for the Korean Institute for Industrial Technology (KITECH). They designed these robots, known as Robotic Interface Learning Facilitators (RILF). The Korean-made RILF teaching android is capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face. RILF also recognizes 400 words and can hold a basic verbal exchange, the minimum requirement for most public school high school teachers forced to teach to the test.
"The robot can serve to provide information in department stores and museums or read stories to children; it’s capable of both education and entertainment functions," said KITECH engineer Sum Young Dong, part of the team that created the RILF, and Chee’s cousin.
Dong says the android, which has the face and body of a woman in her 20s, is 160 cm tall and weighs 50 kg. RILF can move its upper body and “express” happiness, anger, sadness, petulance, sarcasm, pleasure and unbearable snarkiness. But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half (kinda reminds me of my college days in the 70s). RILF-2, which is set to go into production by 2014 (NCLB’s deadline) will have improved vision and ability to express emotions and can sit or stand. It will also feature an optional plug-in Obsequiousness Module, making it totally adaptable to administrative work.
According to a 2004 report by the International Federation of Robotics, Korea ranked 6th in the world in terms of robot market size and 5th in the number of robots used. The government aims to grow the industry to among the world’s top three by 2013 with a global market share of 15 percent, and it expects that, with the ever-increasing demand for docile, lobotomized, non-union teachers in the United States, teaching robots will certainly be the wave of the future.
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