Okay all you tech people, justify this

[DrPizza]

I got an email earlier today, and am only just now getting a chance to really look at it. Robots. In particular, this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIEdZqD_V8Y (2 minute video)

Anyone have any thoughts on justifying the cost educationally($2000-$2500)? Anyone have any good ideas of how this could be used in a math or physics course? I'm just too tired to think about it. (And am about 5 minutes away from being done with writing about 20 pages of documentation of goals my students have to meet that have to be rigorous enough, and through which my effectiveness as a teacher is going to be rated at the end of the school year. Ugh, it's time to go home!)

 

[Crono]

I saw one of those in an episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT). It's hilarious and possibly useful for a virtual field trip across the world, but not for a math or physics course, at least not when $2,000 can buy robotics kits or a whole lotta lasers. I'd rather have lasers.

 

[IronWing]

In the locker room by day three.

 

[SlitheryDee]

If you know any math teachers abroad they could use it to visit your class and give guest "lessons" over the internet. I can't think of much else. It looks kind of laggy if I'm to judge by the unit they were looking at in the video. There were what looked like some prepared advertisement clips mixed in there that showed the device working with very little lag, but the actual robot clearly had a pretty low video frame rate and slow response time to input from the handheld ipad. It's hard to tell how much of that resulted from the network they were using and how much of it was the gadget itself though. Very cool idea, but it would be kind of frustrating if it didn't work well.

 

[DrPizza]

I saw one of those in an episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT). It's hilarious and possibly useful for a virtual field trip across the world, but not for a math or physics course, at least not when $2,000 can buy robotics kits or a whole lotta lasers. I'd rather have lasers.

Pretty much what I was thinking. We have a few things that would be useful for virtual field trips - other schools could visit some things that are rather unique to our school (fish hatchery, big pond, captive deer herd (very tall fencing) for wildlife studies, captive flock of turkeys, capturing & radio collaring other animals (particular deer and turkeys that aren't part of our herd/flock), etc. But, there's no way that thing would get around in those locations.

 

[OutHouse]

sheldon had one of those on the big bang theory, i thought it was just a hollywood prop. pretty cool its actually real. looks like a v.1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bIoeBpSeU4