We at Teq LOVE the NAO robot! As an educational tool, it’s ideal for teaching students about the basics of programming, as well as providing a cute, relateable context for what can be done with such skills. Students are drawn to the 23-inch robot, and quickly finding themselves learning programming vocabulary and logic–all in the name of teaching him to do something like dance or say their name.

What your students may not know is that their new classroom buddy is also a celebrity! In the last few years, Aldebaran and NAO have broken out onto the world robotics stage in a major way–as the primary player of RoboCup.

RoboCup is an international competition designed to push the limits of what domestic robotics is capable of. While there are multiple divisions, ranging from industrial applications to academic papers, the main showpiece is soccer–teams of robots from around the world participate in a soccer tournament, following the same rules as the more-famous human World Cup.

The official goal of the project is to help develop a team of autonomous robots that can beat a World Cup championship team in a match by 2050. While we’re still a good ways away from that point, the NAO robot’s flexibility–in both physical and programming terms–represent the biggest leap towards that goal in the last decade, which is why it has been the default soccer model since 2008.  Teams take advantage of programming that allows the robot to track a ball, follow it, and direct it towards a goal, while NAO’s 25 degrees of freedom allow it to self-correct in case of a mistake or a fall.

So how does this relate to you and your classroom? While students may not have full access to the high-depth programs these robot teams use, they will definitely notice that the hardware and software are similar to what they are already using in the classroom. One of the main tricks of any STEM curriculum is to teach skills that students can then apply in the real world, which becomes much easier when your students can see that they are already working with the same equipment as high-level robotics teams. Teachers can then leverage the RoboCup into new tasks for your students to complete, new discussions about the practical applications of robotics, and increasingly complex programming and problem-solving skills. Advanced classes may even take the initiative and work to imitate the same functions they see in RoboCup matches in their own robots!

(Side note: There’s even a junior league of RoboCup, designed for middle and high-school students. Practiced classes with access to robots may end up considering registration for events in upcoming years.)

This year’s RoboCup is hosted in Hefei, China, and will be ongoing from the 17th to the 23rd of July. You can view this year’s RoboCup main events from their webpage. In additions, matches from previous matches have made it onto YouTube–a simple search will yield you plenty of educational (and comedic) material.

As a sample to leave on, we’d like to present part of a recent German match. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

Postscript: We’d like to congratulate UNSW Australia for their decisive win of this year’s RoboCup 2015 Finals!  Their final match, against B-Human from Germany, is also posted below for your enjoyment.