Congratulations to the Humanoid Robot Project team for winning at this year’s Digital Disruptor Awards with NAO!

The annual ACS Digital Disruptor Awards recognise the achievements and talent of individual ICT professionals and group ICT skills, and service transformations across a range of key award categories.

Here at The Brainary we are proud to share in the success of the Humanoid Robot Project team in winning the Gold Disruptor for 2017 in the category for Service Transformation for the Digital Consumer (NGO/NFP).

This research project has been a collaboration between The Association of Independent Schools of SA (AISSA), who own the NAO robots, Swinburne University, the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology to gain insight into the impact of humanoid robots on student learning, the integration of the robots into the Australian Curriculum and the pedagogical approaches that enhance and extend student learning.

The initial idea for the project emerged in 2014 when AISSA Educational Consultant, Monica Williams, met with Hugh Kingsley of The Brainary to discuss the educational applications of the NAO humanoid robot.

From there The Brainary, which have the NAO franchise in Australia and were the catalyst for the project forming, connected Monica Williams at AISSA to Dr Therese Keane from Swinburne University and two of her colleagues, Dr Chris Chalmers from QUT and Marie Boden from UQ.

One of the great outcomes of this cutting-edge research was learning how children learn in ways not previously known.

Their preliminary findings also indicated an increase in student engagement, differentiation of student learning, self-directed learning, deep learning, and a fostering of creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, coding and computational thinking.

Congratulations to the researchers on a job well done!