May 31, 2021

iTeacher


iTeacher
Who better to teach robotics than a robot themselves?  Photo by Alex Knight via Unsplash

Those worried about robots taking  their jobs may have cause for concern, because the first Russian robotic teacher recently began working in a kindergarten in the northern city of Novy Urengoy. 

Russian company Promobot designed the machine to be able to interact with children and help them to learn more about the basics of robotics in the classroom. Like any good pedagogue, the robot not only knows how to talk to its pupils, but it can also play games with them. 

The company sees robotics and technology playing an even larger role in the world that these children will help to build, and wants to use their resources to educate and prepare for the next generation of innovators. The ability to easily communicate with a robot might be a vital skill for them in the not-so-distant future. And it's probably easier than virtual classes.

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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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