Get the class programming a giant robot face – made of students.

Explore programming by making an affective (relating to moods and emotions) robot face out of card, tubes and students. Program it to react to different kinds of sounds (nasty, nice or sudden) and show different emotions (sad, happy, surprised). Then think up some other facial expressions and program rules to make the face respond to sounds with the new expressions.

Learn about:

• programming
• if statements
• simple object-based programming
• human-computer interaction
• artificial intelligence.

Resources This session comes with linked activity sheets and ‘story’ write-ups that you can download:

• Activity Sheet: Create-a-face [PDF]
• Activity Sheet: The Emotional Robot [PDF]
• Videos linked below
• Slides:  Create a Face [PPT]
• Applet: Create a face applet on cs4fn [LINK]
• Dwengo have created a Dutch translation of the Create-a-face activity [PDF]

This activity is closely related to the Emotion Machine Activity.

Videos

Social Robot video – Blade

Make A Face video

The long history of the Make-a-face activity is it is a simplified version of one from 15 or more years ago. It came out of a workshop at Glasgow University run by Quintin Cutts that I was helping at getting teachers to invent their own unplugged activities. While the teachers were doing that we the instructors (so Quintin, myself and others) thought we should practice what we preached and came up with our own new activity based on a video I had of an emotional robot (that a student of Peter McOwan had created behaving like this.) Very happy the face has taken on a very fun life of its own travelling the country (and the world…)

This is one of my favourite unplugged activities.