Projects

The City as Learning Lab is built around three of our funded and ongoing informal education projects in creative robotics: Robot Diaries; Neighborhood Nets; and Robot 250. These unique projects share the use of specially designed low cost, easy–to–use robotics technologies developed by the Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) lab at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, led by Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh. The approach to the creative robotics curriculum has emerged from the programs that CREATE and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) have developed and evaluated over the last six years. Central to each project is the intent to build communities of learners that develop shared practices around technological fluency, whether at the level of a friend group, a local neighborhood, or an entire city.