Invited Keynote - 2nd Arab Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

I was very honoured to be invited to give the opening keynote at the 2nd Arab Conference on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, held in Amman, Jordan on December 14-16th.  

My keynote was titled “Robotics Today and How we are preparing Students for a Robot Filled Future” and I touched on topics such as the current state of robotics, changes in Robotics Education around the world and how Australia is currently approaching a new ‘Technologies’ curriculum.  Critical Thinking and its interrelation with all curriculum areas was also discussed.

The talk was well received and I had plenty of great conversations with the participants throughout the three days.  In addition to my Keynote, I also ran three EV3 workshops for the delegates.  We did two identical workshops on the basics of EV3 and how it differs from the NXT and one advanced workshop where we dived into more of the complexities of the software.  This advanced workshop concentrated on the new Array feature of the software and I’ll do a separate post on that activity shortly.

The only real downside to the whole trip was the sudden and unexpected snowstorm.  Apparently it was the most snow they have experienced in the region in memory and quite a few people (including the Prince of Jordan) were unable to make it on the first day.

A special note of thanks to Sami Alzein who looked after me and took me around on the last day once the snow had melted enough for traffic to get through!