Senor Parrot’s Perch

The Nexi Robot

(Norwood House Press, 2010)

By Toney Allman

The Nexi Robot (Great Idea) by Toney Allman will fascinate you from beginning to end. It relates the quest of MIT robotics professor Cynthia Breazeal to build a social robot, one that learns like a person does and that interacts with people in a social way. Much different than tool and task oriented robots that dominate the robotics field, social robots are designed to learn from people and interact with people, understanding and showing emotions.

Video introduction to Nexi:

Author Toney Allman does a great job of making these complicated ideas understandable and stimulating. Sometimes the author struggles to keep the writing simple all the way through. At times the level is appropriate for a skilled 2nd grade reader, but overall we’re looking at a book aimed at 3rd and 4th graders and up. The format follows a younger reader level, but don’t let kids be put off. They’ll be rewarded with an excellent story about scientific inquiry that is sure to spur their imaginations and help shape their career and educational choices. I recommend this book for any school or public library or for a kid interested in robotics or engineering.

Here is a “Robots to the Rescue”, a short video kids might enjoy staring Nexi and another flying robot. At the end, you’ll see that Nexi looks like it could use a good dose of Visine as it blinks away the smokey sting from its eyes.

Jackson Fish Market has created an application called A Story Before Bed that lets you read a story to your own kids online. The product has many very cool applications and ideas. Click on this link for a demo.

They have the cooperation of several major children’s book publishers who have licensed digital versions of some of their books. To personalize, i.e. read the book to your kid yourself, all you need is a webcam and a browser, and for $6.99 your on your way to reading and sharing books with your kids or grandkids. Special deals are available for parents in the military. Go to their website to get an idea of how it works.

I tweeted earlier about StoryChimes, an app for the iPhone. This would be perfect for the iPhone, as well.

Here’s a great idea. Justin James, a dad with some cool ways to keep kids occupied, developed his iPhone app, called StoryChimes, to provide stories for kids on their parents iPhones and iPods.

“I want to occupy [my daughter's] time whether we’re at the supermarket or something like that. I can give this to her and she can kind of play with it and listen to a story,” says James. “I just think it’s a little more educational than maybe some sort of game or something she might be playing with.”

James’ simply illustrated stories are narrated by professional actors. He currently has eleven titles available and Story Chimes has children’s songs available, also.

Here’s a video link:

CNET reports an interesting adaption of an advanced video gaming device for use in a military robot. The device manufacturer, Novint Technologies, is a company that makes 3-D touch controllers for video and computer games. These controllers give the gamer a definite sense of touch of the objects in the screen. The military application is to provide robot operators a better sense of how strong the grip of the robot has on objects that it is grasping.

People have all sorts of receptors in our body, both in our skin and our muscular system, that provide us feedback on how strongly we are grasping an object. The adapted video gaming device is being designed to provide that same feedback to operators of military robots. Picking up explosives with out detonating them is an immediate application.

Here is an older demo of a similar device, the Novint Falcon. You can easily see the possibilities in this device and how it might be used to send signals from robotic sensors to the human operator’s fingertips.

Courtesy of NASA

In some crowds science has a bad reputation. These people folks find it dull, or poorly written. It’s a reputation not at all deserved, yet sometimes the writing of science books can leave a bit to be desired. That’s why it’s great news when we learn about the best of the best science books available. So when I saw that The School Library Journal had posted the list of finalists for the American Association for the Advancement of Science Best Science Books for Children and Young Adults, I was excited.

There are three categories: Children’s Science Picture Books, Middle Grades Science Books, and Young Adult Science Books. Today I’ll highlight the nominees for the Children’s Science Picture Books.

Children’s Science Picture Books

Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life

(Blue Sky Press, 2009)

By Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm

Illustrated by Molly Bang

This might have been called “My first book of Photosynthesis”, Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life, Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm explain how plants transform sunlight into energy and life giving food for everything on the planet. The illustrations are colorful and support the simple text. It’s almost magic when an author can explain such a complex web of interaction within a children’s picture book.

Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11

(Atheneum, 2009)

By Brian Floca

Author and illustrator Brian Floca lets us ride along with the Apollo 11 crew as they journey from earth to the moon and back. The illustrations in Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 have a fantastic sense of scale to them. The story is exiting and full of interesting details that bring this historic and inspiring journey to life.

Redwoods

(Roaring Brook, 2009)

By Jason Chin

Redwoods by Jason Chin is a bit reminiscent of Flotsam, a visual fantasy by David Weiner, as it follows a boy who finds a book about the giant redwood trees just before riding the train. As he reads the simple text of the book, the dinosaurs and other things appear in the train window behind him showing what was happening in the world during the lifespan of the spectacular trees. In one of the illustrations a young girl is seen. Later, when the boy puts down the book we see that girl finding the book and beginning to read it herself.

What Bluebirds Do

(Boyds Mills, 2009)

By Pamela F. Kirby

What Bluebirds Do by Pamela F. Kirby highlights a year in the life of bluebirds in beautiful photos. It’s simple text should be readable by many early readers. Following a pair of bluebirds who have nested in her backyard, Kirby captures their daily life, including their raising of five young bluebird chicks. School Library Journal compared this book to The Red-Eyed Tree Frog by Nic Bishop.

Space Scientists have located what they believe are tunnels beneath the surface of Mars. Probably formed by volcanic activity, these tunnels may harbor existing or former microbial life. This story is reported on LiveScience.com and titled Mars Caves Might Protect Microbes (or Astronauts). They may also prove suitable to protect astronauts from manned Mars missions from some of the harsher martian environmental extremes, such as radiation or dust storms.

If you’re interested in an good introduction to the science of astrobiology, or life in outer space, check out Life on Earth — and Beyond: An Astrobiologist’s Quest by Pamela S. Turner. My review of this book from a few months ago is titled Searching for Life on Other Planets.

The New York Times reports an interesting and troubling research finding about how Hispanic children are falling behind their white, middle class peers. The article, titled Hispanic Immigrants’ Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds, discusses several things.

• Hispanic children of immigrants start out in early years equal with their peers
• By Age 3 they are already lagging middle class white children by as much as 6 months in cognitive abilities
• Hispanic immigrant households do not foster learning and cognitive development to nearly the degree that done in middle class white households
• These results may be more related to socioeconomic determinants, and be characteristic of all lower level socioeconomic groups than to race or ethnicity

They go on to emphasize the role of early learning and how its value is demonstrated by activities such as little performances of the ABCs in front of grandparents, that are missing from Hispanic immigrant homes.

The response, of course, is more money on early education. Doubtless, that would help at least a little bit. However, after reading the NYT article, I grew suspicious that either the writer chose to view only a narrow range of possible causes that may have been addressed in the research, or that the researchers had a very narrow focus and perhaps deliberately ignored other factors that influence the early childhood development from these children. My personal guess is that the researchers narrowed the discussion, which perhaps may have been outside the scope of their article.

I have a growing suspicion that we are both tolerating and cultivating a culture of poverty, which has a hallmark of racial and ethnic minorities, but by no means is confined in its association with only minorities. It is this culture of poverty that greatly influences the social and cognitive development of our children, and that it is an increasing outcome of these lifestyle choices that are in play.

The attack must be on the cultural factors and not just handing a kid a book (though I’m completely in favor of that!), nor in just integrating the child into the educational system at an younger age. For all the sniping at middle class values and culture that we often see, they result in a more nurturing and healthful environment for our children that leaves them better prepared for the own lives as adults.

Watch this LEGO Robot video and see why LEGO Mindstorm NXT 2.0 robots are so awesome!

Legos are amazing toys and the LEGO Mindstorm robots go beyond just being a toy into being an almost pure learning platform that can set free the most creative and inventive potential in any kids or adult.

Here’s an awesome bio/LEGO robots video showing one mans life with LEGO Mindstorm robots. From robotextreme.com:

My oldest daughter and I play have a Lego Mindstorm NXT that we play with. Watching this has put a shot of pure adrenaline in our veins. Time and space, it seems, are the only limits to what new things we should be able to create.

How to Be a Detective

By Barbara Mitchelhill

Illustrated by Tony Ross

How to Be a Detective, by Barbara Mitchelhill, and illustrated by Tony Ross, is one of a series Mitchelhill has written about Damien Drooth Supersleuth. Damien is quite the amateur detective. and he has built up quite a reputation in his town as an outstanding amateur sleuth. He’s a confident fellow, conceited, even. If you’re familiar with Nate the Great, he will remind you a bit of him. Written for slightly more advanced readers than Nate the Great, How to Be a Detective has more action and more humor.

When Damien opens a school for detectives he immediately has a long line kids waiting to get in. After a few short words of introduction to identifying criminals, he leads his class into the fray. They head downtown and begin to search for criminals. Watch out! If you have a beard, or maybe close-set eyes, these crime hunting kids will be onto your trail.

And in How to Be a Detective, they do find a tail! Er, a trail! at the local dog show. The whole gang gets involved solving this one and Damien’s students are ready, maybe even more than Damien is.

I’m happy to know that Damien Drooth Supersleuth is a series. I’ve already several more. This is a terrific book for grades 2-5 and could easily become a favorite. I know that my older daughter would have loved this book when she was younger. She consumed every mystery and detective book she could get her hands on, even attempting books much beyond her reading ability at the time.

Barbara Mitchelhill has a website where she talks about her life, career as a teacher and writer, and tells us about all her books.

Via ExtremeRobot, a star wars styled robot powered by a Legos NXT robot:

I suppose shaking around like that is at least something.