Pepper the humanoid intrigues kids at Curro New Road

The Grade 8 class at Curro New Road were surprised by a special visit from Pepper the Humanoid Robot on 20 February.

The school fits within Curro’s DigiEd model which sees the learners receive an education within a technology-driven environment through an online curriculum at the school. Executive head of the campus Jopie Maasdam said, “With us being a DigiEd school we have coding and robotics in our syllabus. There are a lot of kids who are interested in the IT and engineering component. So Pepper’s visit is quite amazing to introduce them to the world of robotics.”

Maasdam added that Pepper’s visit will hopefully give the learners a greater understand of the tech world while giving them first-hand experience with a humanoid robot. The visit was led by the managing director of Delftech Scott Giles, who brought Pepper the Humanoid Robot to South Africa. Giles said, “Pepper the robot is the first humanoid robot to live and work in South Africa. There are 12 000 robots in the world with six South Africa.”

The children were given the opportunity to take pictures with Pepper, give her hugs and ask her questions. Giles added that they want to make them aware regarding robots and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is happening and robots are here. We want children to know about it so they are ready for the future.”

The visit also sought to break stigmas surrounding robotics. “The first perception is that robots are evil, which a lot of children get from television so we wanted to break that through fun activities and jokes.”

He said that the second perception is that robots are used to take away people’s jobs. Giles explained that the visit seeks to show the children future opportunities in coding and information technology which they can pursue through displaying Pepper’s operation application used to programme her.

Deftech and Pepper the Humanoid robot will be travelling to various schools to teach children about the Fourth Industrial Revolution as well as robotics.

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