(KNZA)--Robots will soon be used in the classroom of a local high school, implemented for the next school year at Royal Valley, in Hoyt, as envisioned by Audio Visual Communication Pathway Instructor Teri Griffiths. “[I'm] very excited,” Griffiths tells MSC News, saying the purchase of the robots would not be possible if not for a $5,000 grant provided by communications company Century Link, and presented to the school last week. “It's just such a great new opportunity for us to be able to have these robots and learn programming beyond HTML. We've already received the check, so we'll be ready to go when school starts.”

Griffiths says the small computer controlled robots, which look nothing like R2-D2, or others portrayed by Hollywood, are known as a Finch and a Hummingbird. “It would be really interesting for us to incorporate [the robots] in my audio video classes, because sometimes students don't want to be the actors and I though the robots, then, could kind of be our actors, but we would have to program them to tell them what moves to make and what to do. We also could get some interesting angles with the robots if we used them to put our cameras on. The science teachers and the math teachers will also be able to get involved so it gives us a chance to partner in ways that we haven't before.” 

Griffiths says among the goals and benefits of using the robots in the classroom is to place Royal Valley on the cutting edge of preparing for the future. “It is a field with a huge gap between the projected expectation for the number of jobs and the number of people who are currently thinking about getting into that field. Hopefully, this will give some students a way to experience computers and programming and they might decide that that's something that they want to do for a career.” 

Griffiths will attend a conference in Philadelphia this summer focused on use of the robots, while in-house training will be provided to high school staff , involved with their use, in the future.