December 3 marked
what is in all likelihood the final time that I will teach ‘Embodied Cognitive
Science’ (Psyco 457) at the University of Alberta. I’ve had substantial
difficulty keeping the enrollment in that course up, and decided a few months
ago to teach an introductory Cognitive Psychology course instead of it next
year.
The course itself has
a long history. It emerged from a (failed) attempt to establish some interdisciplinary
cognitive science graduate courses in the late 1990s. (This explains why this
course has always met in the evening – this was the only time that students
from four different Departments had in common.) As graduate enrollment in that
course (INT D 554) fell, it was double-numbered as an undergraduate course, and
I began to introduce LEGO robots into its curriculum. It was then offered
(perhaps in 2001) as PSYCO 403.
The course had some
important developments over the past two decades. I received a McCalla Research
Professorship in 2007 to integrate the course with my research. This led to the
publication of a 2010 book on using LEGO robots to study
embodied cognitive science. In 2013 the course received its current 457
designation.
Over the years there
has been a fair number of students who have worked through the course,
developing some very interesting robots and learning to write papers about embodied
cognitive science. One interesting success story is my current graduate student
Arturo Perez. Arturo stayed in Edmonton for a few months 7 years ago to learn
about teaching cognitive science with robots, and transported those skills to
Chile. One reason that he is back in Edmonton for graduate studies is because
of his experience with this course.
The final edition of
the course was very successful. Students developed a ‘functionally equivalent’
Grey Walter Tortoise over the term. The final class involved exploring the
behavior of three of these machines as they interacted with their environment
(and with each other). The images below reflect various stages of this project.
The index cards scaffolded the students’ building, programming, and tweaking of
their machine. The inventors of this machine pose with their work in the second
photo. A still of robots in action is provided in the third photo. The last
photois a fabulous time-lapse photo taken by Arturo illustrating robot behavior
in a fashion very reminiscent of William Grey Walter’s own work.
