High School and Poppy ! Return on experience - Lycée Polyvalent Ferdinand Buisson

Education
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Dear all,

Here is a short news about a project I did at Grenoble, France, with Lycée Polyvalent Ferdinand Buisson (It’s an high School very very important in our region): https://sites.google.com/site/fb38lanat/

This high school contacted us to show Poppy Humanoid to two different classrooms (High School Level - Classe de Seconde et Classe de Terminal, option technologique, option ISN). The students are between 15 years old and 18 years old.

The aim of this workshop was :

  • Present Poppy and what Inria is doing in terms of research in Robotics.
  • Install all the required libraries on the High School Computers to let the students learn how to program - using Python (Ipython Notebooks) or SNAP! - and playing with Poppy Humanoid and other creatures.

So what I did is :

  • Grab all the required tools and libraries on an USB key. Be aware that many high schools in France uses Windows 7 or 10 :frowning: It means that I download : Anaconda for Windows, V-REP for Windows, SNAP!
  • The High School let their students to be “Administrator” of the windows machine and they also get a WIFI access. As a consequence all the computers/students could install the Pypot, PoppyHumaonoid and Poppy-Creature Libraries (Pip install … bla bla …).

Once all these tools has been installed, the students started to play with PoppyHumaoind in VREP. Either they used the Python scripts … either they used SNAP!

Very quickly most of them started to use SNAP! rather than playing with Python :slightly_smiling:

The exercises ?

  • They had to** make poppy say ‘yes’ and ‘no’** with his head. This means that the student has to learn how to use a ‘repeat’ loop, a 'for … in ’ loop. Of course they used the V-REP simulator. We did not had time to test their program on the real robot.
  • Next, they had to make Poppy applause in the simulator VREP. It included many very nice algorithms (if … then … else… for in … while … instructions).

ALL the Students… yes … ALL OF THEM SUCCEEDDED !! YOUAHHHH !!!

Next actions ?
The teacher learned a lot thanks to this experience, he knows how to program (and install) poppy creatures… He wants to develop a lot of activities around Poppy, the simulator V-REP and the graphical editor SNAP!

Thanks to the Poppy Robot (and V-REP simulator) the teacher can teach programming with a very motivating mean : using Robots is a good excuse to get on programming !

Next the high School wants to create a Robotic Club and I guess that Poppy Experience has convinced many teachers and students : 3 students (17 years old) came with their own computer to install all the resuired tools to program by themselves Poppy robots :slightly_smiling:

Let’s wait and see now !

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9 Likes
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Congratulations for this very interesting and motivating example of a teaching program based on Poppy! As a former student from this high school, I can tell that I would have been thrilled to work with Poppy as a teaching platform. Not that all the practical works were boring but… I guess programming automated gates isn’t as exciting as programming a humanoid robot.

Congratulations to the students who managed to discover and use Poppy so quickly! I hope that the Robotics club initiative will grow and lead to enlightening projects :slightly_smiling:

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That’s a nice experience and I hope this will enlighten your neighbors in Lyon area :wink: