On Monday, Oct. 17, at noon, Eastern Standard Time, a fictional, nameless robot from a distant civilization -- sent to Earth to collect scientific data about our world -- will "crash land" in Montreal, Quebec.
Who will help the plucky robot find her away across the US to Los Angeles, so she can be launched into space and return home?
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It's not a real robot, of course, but a cute little plush toy with a really big heart and a GPS chip to track her progress. And the "crash landing" marks the official launch of Robot Heart Stories, a ten-day "experiential education" project dreamed up by award-winning designer and filmmaker Lance Weiler.
Helping the robot along her journey -- and naming her -- will be the students in two fifth-grade classrooms separated by more than 3000 miles: one in Montreal, the other in Los Angeles. They'll use writing, math, geography, and collaborative problem-solving as they track the robot's progress, and help determine the route she takes on her way to Los Angeles.
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The event will culminate with an actual launching of the robot into space via a weather balloon mounted with a camera. The students will be able to watch a livestream feed as the robot ascends to the stratosphere.
Discovery News chatted with Weiler (best known for the indie film, Pandemic, which made a splash at Sundance in 2010) about the goals of Robert Heart Stories, and whether his experiential approach just might be the key to rebooting education.
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Discovery News: Where did you get the idea for this project?
Lance Weiler: The idea came from watching my son and my mother as she was reading to him on the iPad -- and at the same time she was doing that he was teaching her how to use it. I've been a storyteller for awhile, I've made films, designed games, some TV and so forth. Seeing their interaction made me start thinking about how education could become more experiential. How could you connect kids in different cities and put an educational experience directly into their hands? That led to Robot Heart Stories.
DN: What are some ways the students will be able to direct the narrative, within the basic scenario that serves as a framework?
LW: One example I've been using is, say the kids want the robot to visit Mount Rushmore and have tea with unicorns. Our team, a photographer and a documentary filmmaker, both of whom are traveling with the robot, would actually take it to Mount Rushmore and take pictures. We have teamed with a community called Design Related, whose illustrators would bring to life the other elements like the unicorn, and those materials would eventually be collected into a book.
As the students track the robot's progress, they encounter these narrative, collaborative problem-solving challenges. For instance, her fuel is nearly depleted as she enters our atmosphere and the kids will come to realize that she’s powered by passion and creativity. They will learn eventually that it’s a mix between the creativity from Montreal and the science from Los Angeles that helps the robot make her way back home.
DN: Why did you pick those two classrooms in Montreal and Los Angeles, specifically?
LW: There are French speaking students in Montreal and an English and Spanish speaking class in Los Angeles, because we wanted to play with the communications aspect. Eventually we want to do Robot Heart Stories 2.0, where the robot travels around the world and visits schools and stays with host families.
The two schools are working with the Doctor Julian Foundation in Quebec, a well-known educational innovator, and Story Pirates in Los Angeles, who do innovative experiential educational things within schools. We’ve shaped a narrative that works in conjunction with their own curriculum.
DN: It can be difficult to coordinate these kinds of "edutainment" projects across different curriculum requirements. How did you tackle that challenge?
LW: One of the overall ideas is to build these experiential educational umbrella events that schools can plug into, no matter where they are in their calendar year, or in their own curriculum. For example, the Los Angeles class is all about alternative energy sources and space during the 10 days of the project, while the Montreal class is focused on art and communication. We wanted to make it universal, the curriculum could be touching on geography, history, math, or creative writing, and we’re bridging it with this fun experiential narrative where the students can connect to other schools around the world.
DN: Robot Heart Stories is almost entirely crowd-sourced, both in terms of fundraising and in execution. How has that benefited the project?
LW: We're working with IndieGoGo, one of the largest global crowd-sourcing Websites, and the crowdfunding aspect is connected to our ability to rapidly prototype. Peter Sims wrote a book called Little Bets describing this idea: that by making little bets and rapidly prototyping, you can achieve big breakthroughs. We’re moving at such an accelerated pace with this. We came up with the concept in late May and we’re launching Robot Heart Stories five months later. Usually you write a grant a year or more in advance.
Also, a lot of people test with extreme users; we decided to co-create with extreme users who are passionate about education. It's a similar approach to Amazon Turk: we run a backend system and our collaborators volunteer and step in wherever they can help. We ended up with collaborators from all over the world, a mix of educators filmmakers, storytellers, and designers, all working together on this project. There are all kinds of levels of co-creation that exist now because of the democratization of the tools.
Robot Heart Stories from WorkBook Project on Vimeo.
Tags: Current Events, Robotics
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