When the NAO Robot performs one of it’s many pre-programmed tasks, it always captures the attention of everyone in a room. As advanced as technology is these days, there is just something about a robot talking, responding to questions, and pulling off some serious yoga moves that always piques the interest of an audience.

But grabbing a student’s attention for a few moments while it dances does not do justice to how this amazing educational tool can be used in the classroom. During our recent Teq webinar, Tim demonstrated a “Choose Your Own Adventure” activity that brings the NAO robot into the ELA classroom, with a lesson on narrative writing in collaborative groups.

The “Choose Your Own Adventure with NAO” activity is designed to have students write stories that require the reader to make multiple decisions that result in different story lines. Throughout the writing process, students consider the use of the various inputs on the NAO robot, such as speech recognition, vision recognition, and multiple tactile sensors, to create an interactive experience for the audience.

Here are a few things I learned about NAO during the activity, and what I learned about integrating the robot and its programming into the classroom as a platform to engage students in the writing process.

It’s NOT just about programming

Of course, the first thing you might think about when seeing NAO is programming. This is just one part of integrating NAO into the classroom. NAO is a platform for problem solving, group work, collaboration, planning, and more. A student or group of students could spend weeks of class time scripting, planning, and preparing what they will program NAO to do before they ever get to touch the robot or the associated programming software.

Writing Tasks

Ultimately, this activity is all about narrative writing and can include a variety of different story writing skills. To help with ideas, provide students with a writing prompt to get them started. In our example during the webinar, Tim used a prompt that had students planning a weekend trip to NYC and different things they could do along the way.

Group Work

Many projects that incorporate NAO can easily include group work during the planning and programming stages of the activity. Tim suggested breaking the students into groups of four, and planning the beginning of the story together. Separating the group of four into two groups of two, each pair would then write a different part of the story stemming from the first decision.

Individual work

Tim then broke those pairs up after the final decision and had each student individually write a separate ending to the story. This is a great way to ensure that students have a part in the overall narrative and opens the possibility for four very unique endings.

Scripting

Most of the work that goes into this activity is in scripting and storyboarding. The students not only have to write the narrative of the story, but also plan out each movement and types of interactions with the robot. Using graphic organizer templates and collaborative tools like Google Drive, students have the ability to work on the project as a group with the teacher being able to monitor and comment on student’s drafts inside of the Google Document.

So it is about programming

After all the planning, scripting and storyboarding the students will bring their finished product to life by programming the story, decisions, and movements of the robot. By using the Choregraphe software, students must do the programming basics to make the robot speak, move, recognize speech, recognize objects and more. Each movement must have been planned and executed — great for learning logical and step processes.

Throughout the process students are engaged with a variety of typical classroom activities and skills. The final product being NAO telling an interactive story that differs depending on the decisions made along the way.