{"id":101228,"date":"2020-01-22T16:03:57","date_gmt":"2020-01-23T00:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/profile-christian-wanamaker-teaches-robots-to-learn-how-to-help-students"},"modified":"2020-01-22T16:03:57","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T00:03:57","slug":"profile-christian-wanamaker-teaches-robots-to-learn-how-to-help-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/profile-christian-wanamaker-teaches-robots-to-learn-how-to-help-students","title":{"rendered":"Profile: Christian Wanamaker Teaches Robots to Learn How to Help Students"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/profile-christian-wanamaker-teaches-robots-to-learn-how-to-help-students.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe thing I find rewarding about coding: You\u2019re literally creating something out of nothing. You\u2019re kind of like a wizard.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>When the smiley-faced robot tells two boys to pick out the drawing of an ear from three choices, one of the boys, about 5, touches his nose. \u201cNo. Ear,\u201d his teacher says, a note of frustration in her voice. The child picks up the drawing of an ear and hands it to the other boy, who shows it to the robot. \u201cYes, that is the ear,\u201d the ever-patient robot says. \u201cGood job.\u201d The boys smile as the teacher pats the first boy in congratulations.<\/p>\n<p>The robot is powered by technology created by <a href=\"https:\/\/moviarobotics.com\/\">Movia Robotics<\/a>, founded by Tim Gifford in 2010 and headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut. Unlike other companies that have made robots intended to work with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such <a href=\"https:\/\/beatbots.net\/keepon-pro\">Beatbots<\/a>, Movia focuses on building and integrating <a href=\"https:\/\/moviarobotics.com\/woz-software\">software that can work with a number of humanoid robots<\/a>, such as the <a href=\"https:\/\/robots.ieee.org\/robots\/nao\/\">Nao<\/a>. Movia has robots in three school districts in Connecticut. Through a U.S. Department of Defense contract, they\u2019re being added to 60 schools for the children of military personnel worldwide.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s Gifford\u2019s former computer science graduate student, Christian Wanamaker, who programs the robots. Before graduate school at the University of Connecticut, Wanamaker used his computer science degree to program commercial kitchen fryolators. He enjoys a crispy fry as much as anyone, but his work coding for robot-assisted therapy is much more challenging, interesting and rewarding, he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe thing I find rewarding about coding: You\u2019re literally creating something out of nothing. You\u2019re kind of like a wizard.\u201d When the smiley-faced robot tells two boys to pick out the drawing of an ear from three choices, one of the boys, about 5, touches his nose. \u201cNo. Ear,\u201d his teacher says, a note of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,9,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-military","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}