Mackayi Memorial College, Natete
Hosted a cafe on:-
Science, Robots and how do they Work?
Date: 30th July 2009
Speaker: Francis Byaruhanga
Francis really arrested the students’ attention, sharing his profound knowledge of robotics. Francis, a physics and computer science teacher, holds an MSc in Computer learning with special interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
One teacher attending the café for the first time commented that students always amazed him with the kind of things they wanted to know given the opportunity. Robotics is definitely not part of the normal science curriculum!
What are robots and how different are they from human beings? Francis began by encouraging students to say what defined a human being: framework (skeleton), brain, muscles, sensory system, able to move …Framcis pointed out that robots can do or have all of these things to a certain level but ‘There are two things a robot does not have however: a robot has no feelings or empathy and its intelligence cannot go beyond that which is put in its memory. It cannot apply what is has acquired to a new situation. Therefore they are made to do specific tasks and that is how differ from human beings’.
Students had many questions: who makes robots, what jobs can they do, could robots have human-like skin, what if robots ‘go wild’, what is the difference between a robot and a computer and is it possible ot buy a robot to do the housework?
