School of Fun for Children in Fukushima

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

Using Japan’s three-day weekend in August, we returned once again to Waseda University and held a robotics camp, which was a rematch of the May camp. Twenty boys and girls from Tohoku and Kanto, ranging from 3rd grade in elementary school to 2nd year in high school, participated in this camp. We spent three days in hot Tokyo, being careful about heatstroke, but in the end, we were helped by the rain.

This time as well, the theme was prototyping a power-sharing infrastructure in a future village. Each house generates its own electricity through renewable energy, but when it’s not enough, it receives power from neighboring houses. However, this village has no power lines (because if they break, electricity cannot be delivered), so a six-legged robot called a hexapod carries batteries on its back. In this camp, we introduced a finely controlled robot arm that can load a battery onto the hexapod’s back or receive a battery from its back.

Both robots can be controlled by speaking to them in Japanese through a smartphone, and they move as instructed (though since the hexapod’s movements aren’t very precise, the children had a hard time with it). Because the sequence of actions was complicated, the children taught the robots to remember them as bundled skills. In reality, the robots run on Python code, so what was happening was that the children would tell the robots what they wanted to do, the AI installed on the robots would write Python code, execute it, and if the movement didn’t go as intended, the children would tell the robots to fix it. In other words, it was a kind of “vibe coding” done through the robots.

The children designed the battery transport as a game using the robots. They thought about what actions should earn points and what actions should lose points. Compared to the May camp, both the children and the robots had improved, and each team was just barely able to transport the batteries. However, since things didn’t always work as they wanted, there were also some frustrating moments. That’s why this series of robotics camps will continue in the future, gradually increasing in complexity.

Even so, the ones who truly shined were the high school students. If we think of human thinking as having two patterns—one being “tackling a given goal, overcoming difficulties, and achieving it,” and the other being “creating something new that doesn’t yet exist”—then in the previous camp, it became clear that the children were actually weaker at the former. That meant training in that area was needed. In this camp, however, the high school students came up with a fun game in which players had to communicate and reproduce somewhat complex shapes through a message-passing activity, and by running it together, everyone got good training. As sub-leaders of each group, the high school students also skillfully guided the battery transport game according to the rules devised by their teams. We are really looking forward to seeing their continued growth!

Links:

• Academy Camp Facebook page in English