Who decides what robots look like?

Summary

But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids Episode Summary: "Who Decides What Robots Look Like?" Release Date: December 13, 2024
Host: Jane Lindholm
Produced by: Vermont Public

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Introduction to Robots at GlobalFoundries

In this episode of But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, host Jane Lindholm explores the fascinating world of robots with the help of engineers Adrian Plouffe and Lucy White from GlobalFoundries, a leading microchip manufacturing company in Essex Junction, Vermont. Jane introduces listeners to Gulliver, an Omron robot tasked with transporting items within the factory (00:41). She sets the stage for a deep dive into the role of robots in modern manufacturing and addresses the intriguing question: Who decides what robots look like?

Understanding GlobalFoundries and Its Operations

Adrian Plouffe provides an overview of GlobalFoundries’ operations, emphasizing their role in producing microchips that power a vast array of devices, from cell phones to cars (03:18). Lucy White elaborates on the complexity of their factory, aptly named Fab 9, and the essential role robots play in handling repetitive and precise tasks that are challenging for humans to perform consistently (02:15).

How Robots Operate and Their Functions

Adrian explains the basic functioning of Omron robots, comparing them to mobile platforms or carts equipped with shelves that transport products across the site (03:04). He highlights the efficiency of using robots for tasks such as moving wafers and boxes containing microchips, allowing human employees to focus on operating the intricate machinery on the production floor (03:21). Lucy adds that robots also monitor equipment temperatures, ensuring optimal operating conditions and preventing overheating (02:15).

Design and Appearance: Decisions Behind Robot Aesthetics

The episode delves into the critical question of who decides what robots look like. Adrian responds by linking robot design to their intended functions, stating, “what really decides what a robot looks like is the process of deciding what the robot's going to do” (15:23). He explains that engineers and roboticists shape robots based on their tasks, such as adding arms for specific operations or legs for mobility in diverse environments (15:23). This functional approach ensures that each robot is optimized for its designated role within the factory.

Advanced Features and Autonomous Capabilities

Jane and the engineers discuss the advanced capabilities of modern robots. Lucy mentions the evolution of robots that can navigate uneven terrain and adapt to obstacles without human intervention, a significant leap from early models that struggled with such challenges (11:37). Adrian introduces Spot, an autonomous robot dog designed by Boston Dynamics, equipped with thermal cameras and AI-driven systems to inspect equipment and ensure safety (16:48). Spot’s ability to autonomously navigate and perform tasks like opening doors and flipping switches showcases the sophisticated integration of robotics in industrial settings (16:48).

Anthropomorphism and the Perception of Robots

The conversation shifts to the human tendency to anthropomorphize robots—attributing human-like qualities to non-human entities. Lucy explains that while robots like Spot can exhibit behaviors that seem lifelike, such as reacting to their environment, they lack true consciousness or emotions (21:06). Adrian concurs, highlighting that robots operate based on programmed instructions and sensors, devoid of self-awareness or feelings (23:17). This distinction helps clarify why robots are powerful tools but not living beings (22:00).

Robots and the Definition of Life

When asked by a young listener, "Are robots alive?" Lucy and Adrian provide clear answers. Lucy states, “Robots are not alive. They are built and controlled by humans. They don't breathe on their own, they don't eat, they can't reproduce and create new robots, and they don't have consciousness” (22:13). This explanation reinforces the understanding that robots, despite their advanced functionalities, remain sophisticated machines created to assist humans (22:36).

Careers in Robotics: Inspiring the Next Generation

Before concluding, the engineers encourage young listeners interested in robotics to pursue education in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). They suggest engaging in activities like building with Legos or taking computer programming courses to develop the necessary skills for a future in engineering and robotics (24:34). Adrian emphasizes the importance of passion and perseverance in mastering scientific and mathematical concepts (25:02).

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Jane wraps up the episode by thanking Adrian and Lucy for their insights and acknowledging the contributions of their colleagues at GlobalFoundries. She reiterates the importance of staying curious and invites listeners to submit their questions for future episodes (26:14). The episode effectively demystifies the role and design of robots in modern industries, providing young listeners with a comprehensive understanding of how robots are integrated into manufacturing processes and the thoughtful considerations behind their designs.

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Notable Quotes

• Adrian Plouffe (03:06): “Omron robots are mobile platforms for our site. So picture it as a cart with a shelf on top, and that robot can go to different locations and pick up and drop off product for us.”

• Lucy White (02:15): “GlobalFoundries is a big company that operates around the world making microchips that go in everything from cell phones to cars to maybe the tablets you're using.”

• Adrian Plouffe (15:23): “What really decides what a robot looks like is the process of deciding what the robot's going to do.”

• Lucy White (21:06): “Spot is really cool, and it does look and move like a dog, although it has a giant neck and a grasping arm instead of a head, which can be kind of weird looking.”

• Adrian Plouffe (22:13): “Robots are not alive. They are built and controlled by humans. They don't breathe on their own, they don't eat, they can't reproduce and create new robots, and they don't have consciousness.”

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Key Takeaways

• Robotic Functionality: Robots at GlobalFoundries perform essential tasks such as transporting microchips, monitoring equipment, and maintaining safety, significantly enhancing operational efficiency.

• Design Principles: The appearance and functionality of robots are determined by their intended tasks, with engineers customizing designs to optimize performance.

• Advanced Robotics: Modern robots exhibit autonomous capabilities, allowing them to navigate complex environments and perform tasks without continuous human oversight.

• Human-Robot Interaction: While robots can mimic certain human-like behaviors, they remain tools devoid of consciousness, emotions, or life.

• Future of Robotics: Encouraging STEM education and hands-on activities can inspire the next generation to pursue careers in engineering and robotics, fostering innovation in the field.

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Stay Curious!
For more intriguing questions and answers, tune in to the next episode of But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids.

Transcript

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[Jane Lindholm]

This is but why? A podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm, and if that music sounds a little tinny today, it's because it's coming out of a robot. A robot called an Omron. This one's name is Gulliver, and it works at Global Foundries at a fabrication foundry in Vermont. And its job is to transport things from one place to another. It's kind of mad at me right now. Today we're going to talk all about.

[Adrian Plouffe]

Robots going to $973.

[Lucy White]

GlobalFoundries is a big company that operates around the world making microchips that go in everything from cell phones to cars to maybe the tablets you're using. The factory in Vermont is called Fab 9. It's a really big place, so sometimes they use robots to help carry boxes from one place to another. There are robots in a lot of their tools that do repetitive tasks that would be really hard for a human to do the same way every time. And sometimes they even have robots that go around rooms, sensing the temperature of the equipment to make sure it's not overheating. So since it's just a couple of miles from our headquarters at Vermont Public, we thought we'd go to GlobalFoundries to learn more about robots and to get some answers to the questions you've been sending us. The robot playing the but why? Theme song is one of the robots that takes boxes of microchips from one part of the facility to another. It looks a little bit like a filing cabinet on wheels, but it has big googly eyes stuck on the front of it. As you heard, it plays music as it roams the hallways, and if you get in its way, it very politely says, excuse me. This type of robot is called an Omron, and this one in particular was named Gulliver, after a fictional character that travels the world. Gulliver might seem like it's moving around of its own free will, but it's actually been programmed by an engineer. And you can see the marks from its wheels all through the hallways as it travels the same path back and forth day after day. One of the people in charge of programming robots like Gulliver is Adrian Plouffe, a factory automation engineer at GlobalFoundries. Adrian told us a little bit about how Gulliver works.

[Adrian Plouffe]

It's called an Omron robot.

[Jane Lindholm]

What does Omron do?

[Adrian Plouffe]

So Omron robots are mobile platforms for our site. So. So picture it as a cart with a shelf on top, and that robot can go to different locations and pick up and drop off product for us.

[Jane Lindholm]

Why wouldn't you want a person to do that?

[Adrian Plouffe]

So our people here are very busy actually operating the tools on the process floor. So why would we have them carry things from one end of the site to the other, which can take 15 or 20 minutes when we can have a robot do that for us?

[Lucy White]

We did not want to keep Gulliver from its work for too long, so Adrian pushed a couple of buttons and Gulliver left on its way.

[Adrian Plouffe]

Go ahead, Gulliver.

[Lucy White]

Playing the but why?

[Jane Lindholm]

Theme song See you later.

[Lucy White]

We decided we'd better get out of the way of any other robots or people moving through the halls. So Adrian and I went to a quieter room where we were joined by another engineer so we could answer your robot questions and find out a little bit more about what robots do at this company.

[Elisha]

Hi, I'm Lucy White and I'm a process engineer at GlobalFoundries. My job means that I am in charge of a certain kind of equipment and making sure that it's running correctly. And if it's not working properly, I try to figure out what's wrong with it.

[Jane Lindholm]

We both work at this place called GlobalFoundries, but it's hard to tell from the name what it makes and why you need robots.

[Adrian Plouffe]

We produce microchips that go in all types of technologies that, that are distributed around the world. Specifically, GlobalFoundries in Burlington is a 200 millimeter semiconductor foundry.

[Jane Lindholm]

And when we say microchip, micro means small. So these are very tiny little things that go in technology.

[Lucy White]

How big are they?

[Jane Lindholm]

That 200 millimeter, it's hard to understand what that means.

[Adrian Plouffe]

Yeah, so the wafer that we do our production on, so think of that like our piece of paper you're drawing on is 8 inches across. But within that, that 8 inch shape, we have incremental lines where all this data gets transmitted through in all these little wires. And those can be smaller than like your piece of hair.

[Elisha]

It can be 10,000 times smaller than a piece of hair. So on that one big, we call them wafers. The piece of paper there can be up to 20,000 microchips on that one piece of paper.

[Jane Lindholm]

And they're not really paper, right?

[Elisha]

No, they're actually made on silicon.

[Jane Lindholm]

What's silicon?

[Elisha]

Silicon is a semiconductor, meaning that it both can conduct electricity and cannot conduct electricity.

[Jane Lindholm]

Why is that important that it does both things?

[Elisha]

It's important because that's how we're able to turn things on and off.

[Lucy White]

To put all of that simply, GlobalFoundries makes microchips. Microchips are tiny pieces of technology that go in all kinds of devices, from your electronic games to the cell phones your adults use, laptop computers, modern cars, the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. They're kind of like the miniature brains of your electronic devices. Each microchip is a series of electronic circuits on a small, flat piece of silicon or other semiconducting material. That means a material that can both move electricity through it, but can also act as an insulator, stopping electricity from moving through it so it can be turned on and off. Microchips can store a ton of information in very small packages. So at a place like GlobalFoundries, they're making these complicated microchips all day and all night, and they use robots to help build the microchips and do other things.

[Adrian Plouffe]

We definitely have hundreds of types of robots. I bet we have somewhere less than a thousand, but Definitely more than 700 individual robots here on site.

[Lucy White]

What do robots do here?

[Elisha]

Robots here help us in many different ways. First, robots can be used to help making sure that our larger pieces of equipment are working properly and help the maintenance team then fix the robots if they're not. Most of our robots are helping us move the wafers that we are talking about or the boxes that carry all the wafers from place to place. Our fab is very big, and so humans no longer have to walk all the way across the fab every single time. We can give them to robots and have the robots move them for us.

[Various Kids]

My name is Elisha. I am five years old. I live in Clarksville, Michigan. How do robots work? My name is Henry. I'm from Los Angeles, California. I'm four. And how do robots work? Hi, I am Hank. I am five years old. I live in Grenaba, California. I want to know how robots work. Hi, my name's Luca. I live in Southland, Michigan, and I would like to know how robots work. My name is James, I'm six, and I live on St Jacobs, Ontario. My question is, how do you program a robot?

[Adrian Plouffe]

So how do robots work? That's an awesome question. Robots work by being given commands. So, for example, Go here, pick something up here. A lot of our robots work kind of like a taxicab service, if you want to think about it that way. They said, hey, I have to pick something up here and then drop it off here. And then once they arrive at their drop off location, they go right back into kind of the flow where they say, okay, I can now pick something else up from somewhere else and drop it off somewhere different.

[Jane Lindholm]

When you say they respond to commands. If I go up to a robot here and I say move, is that.

[Lucy White]

The kind of command you mean?

[Adrian Plouffe]

They might not listen to that command. Most of our robots work off being sent like a text or an email that has the list of say, hey, here's where you're going to pick up and then here's where you're going to drop off. But we do have other ways of interacting with these robots where we can go up to a screen and push a couple of buttons that tell it where to go and then where to get back, where to end up.

[Lucy White]

It's all computer programming. That's essentially the language that robots speak or respond to. Digital commands that help a robot understand how to respond in various situations. Here's a question from Nicholas, and I'm.

[Various Kids]

Five years old, I live in Washington, D.C. how does remote control send signals to robots?

[Jane Lindholm]

So when Nicholas asks, how do remote controls send signals to robots, how are the robots getting those texts and those signals?

[Elisha]

It's a little bit of a tricky answer. Think of a remote controller like a magic wand. When you point the controller at the robot, what you're actually doing is sending invisible waves with information on it. The robots then take that information, turn it into the commands, and then do what we want it to do. And that's what we do at GlobalFoundries and what a microchip is. The microchips help send the signals and receive the signals for the robots to do their jobs.

[Jane Lindholm]

So it's kind of blowing my mind in that the robots are helping to make microchips, but the microchips are what are controlling the robots to begin with. So they're kind of making something that's already in them. It's like a full circle.

[Elisha]

Yeah, it's pretty crazy when you think about it.

[Various Kids]

I'm Hughes and I'm four years old and I live in Chattanooga. And I live in Chattanooga. And I want to know, how are robots controlled?

[Jane Lindholm]

How are robots controlled? You mentioned commands. They respond to commands. But are we always using little controllers to make them move?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Not always. So that's the most fun Way to do it, I think, because we can literally use a video game controller to drive the robot, or there's buttons that tell it to do all the different things that it can do. But we can also, like I said earlier, send an email or a text command to it. And then eventually we can get to the point where the robots can just kind of operate on their own. They know that they get a call or a response from something that says, hey, I need you to do this, but do it in 10 minutes or do it in an hour.

[Various Kids]

I'm Edric. I'm from Ogden, Utah. I'm four years old. And how do robots move?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Robots move a ton of ways, but the two things that a robot needs to move are it needs a power source and then needs a way to convert the power from that source into movement. So that could be like a battery and an electric motor, or you could think about it like an engine in the car, or it could even just be like wind and, you know, like a windmill, the way it can convert wind power into movement.

[Jane Lindholm]

And some of the ways that robots are being developed is to move in new kinds of ways, because early robots, ones that moved on their own, would often encounter an obstacle and they couldn't do anything about it. And some of the new robots that are being developed can go on uneven ground and can climb sort of rocks and boulders without just tipping over, which is pretty wild to think about that nobody's telling them, look out, there's a rock. They can sense it and know how to actually move without a human lifting them up and making them move. What do robots do generally around the world? How do we think about what a robot is and how it's different from.

[Lucy White]

Just a tool or a computer?

[Elisha]

Well, I think that tools help humans do a job easier. So in a way, robots are kind of like tools. However, if you had to point out some differences, I would say that robots use power, and robots are able to do the task without a human having to be right there. So if you think about a screwdriver and a drill, a screwdriver you have to hold in your hand and turn it in order to get that screw in. A drill is powered and can help do that task a lot easier. And then if we had a robot with a drill on it, we would be able to set up that robot to be drilling without a human having to stand next to it.

[Lucy White]

So a robot is a tool, but it's also capable of doing complex tasks through that programming Adrian was talking about earlier without a human having to Move it. It moves automatically. And many advanced robots can sense things in the environment and act differently depending on the situation. It can sometimes be tricky to decide exactly what is and isn't a robot. Like, is your car a robot? Maybe not. Maybe it's a tool that helps you get from one place to another, and you're the one, or your adult is the one pushing the pedal and steering the steering whee wheel. But some cars can drive without someone pushing the pedal or without someone even steering. You may have heard of driverless cars, but even in cars with drivers, sometimes the car will alert the driver if they're veering off to the side and correct on its own or will stop on its own if it senses an object behind the car when the car is reversing. Or you could take your hands off the wheel altogether. And some cars will do a tricky parallel park for you while you are just sitting in the driver's seat. So are they robots?

[Adrian Plouffe]

I think a car can be a robot.

[Elisha]

I think as technology gets more and more advanced, it becomes a little bit trickier to define what's a robot and what's a tool.

[Various Kids]

Hi, my name is Joaquin, and I'm six years old.

[Lucy White]

And I'm Romina. I'm Joaquin's mum, and I'm 37 years old.

[Various Kids]

I live in Australia, specifically in Richmond, with my mama. My question is, why are robots made out of metal? And who decides what they look like?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Robots are made out of metal is an awesome thought to have because metal is a great material to work with. It's strong, it lasts up against wear and tear. It can also be shaped in a lot of different ways. You know, we can bend it and cut it and weld it and even form it with some really fancy CNC machines. In addition to metal, though, sometimes we need to think about how heavy a robot's gonna be because it has to be able to move. So sometimes we use other materials, like plastic or carbon fiber, where we can also make robots lighter and, you know, so they can have different properties or different abilities to be able to move and kind of seamlessly work well.

[Jane Lindholm]

Joaquin also wants to know, though, who decides what a robot looks like?

[Adrian Plouffe]

So what really decides what a robot looks like is the process of deciding what the robot's going to do. So you think a robot that looks like, I don't know, a whale probably wouldn't be too helpful for cleaning your room. So you need to think about it in a way that says, okay, a robot that's going to help me, you know, pick up my toys probably needs to have an arm on it so that all of a sudden, great, now we have an arm on this robot. Is my room upstairs? Now, the robot has to have legs so it can go upstairs instead of wheels. But the person who actually puts those thoughts together now are engineers, or what we call roboticists. And they're the people who are imagining what all these devices can look like and how they work and actually building them.

[Lucy White]

Coming up, we're going to meet a robot dog. This is. But why? A podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. We're talking about robots today with engineers Adrienne Plouffe and Lucy White at the place where they work, a microchip factory in Essex junction, Vermont, called GlobalFoundries. The whole time I've been talking with Adrian and Lucy in this nice, quiet conference room, there's been a robot in the room with us rolled over on its side. But here's the thing. The robot is shaped to look like a dog. So it's like we've had this pet dog rolled over on its side, sleeping next to us as we're chatting. Adrian told me before we got started that this type of robot is called Spot.

[Jane Lindholm]

And.

[Lucy White]

And this particular one was given the name Squidward. That's a character in a cartoon show called SpongeBob SquarePants. At some point, I just had to ask, can we talk about Spot?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Of course we can talk about Spot. He is a good boy sitting right there. Spot is a autonomous mobile robot from a company called Boston Dynamics. So autonomous means this robot doesn't need to be told explicitly where you can and can't walk. He has the ability to see around him as he's moving and able to determine, hey, can I walk down this aisle or can I go up these stairs? Spot we use to look at or inspect our equipment. So one of the big components we use at this facility is we move a lot of water and chemicals. And to do that, we need pumps, which can push that liquid to the different types of equipment, and we need to maintain that equipment. So Spot has a thermal camera on his head. Picture it like a thermometer that you can use from a distance, and he can take pictures of that equipment for us and then export them to my computer or Lucy's computer, or even to an AI driven data aggregation system where we can have the computer tell us, hey, is this piece of equipment running too hot or too cold? So instead of having me walk around our basement and inspect hundreds of possibly thousands of different pieces of equipment, I can only look at the five or six that Spot thinks might have a problem.

[Jane Lindholm]

And so robots can also do things that are dangerous for people to do. And you can send a robot like Spot in to check things out and walk around and see if everything is safe or if it had a different sensor on it to see what chemicals are in the air and keep people safe so that they're not having to be in that environment.

[Adrian Plouffe]

Absolutely.

[Lucy White]

Can you show us how it works?

[Adrian Plouffe]

We can absolutely talk how it works.

[Lucy White]

Adrian pushed a few buttons on his controller, which looked a lot like a gaming controller or a small tablet, and this robot dog rolled over and stood up.

[Adrian Plouffe]

Right now I am making a move. When we actually put him to work, he does it all on his own, kind of like a Roomba.

[Jane Lindholm]

And what does Squidward do if somebody walks in front of him?

[Adrian Plouffe]

He stops.

[Jane Lindholm]

Can we try it?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Absolutely we can.

[Jane Lindholm]

Okay, you have him walk, and I'll stand in front of him.

[Various Kids]

Can you stand in front of him?

[Elisha]

Yeah.

[Adrian Plouffe]

So all I'm gonna do is just say, squidward, go forward, and I'm not gonna do anything else.

[Jane Lindholm]

Okay. He's better behaved than my dog.

[Adrian Plouffe]

He's very good. And all of these settings we can control. So we say, hey, maybe that was too close. We can say, nope, don't get that close. Stay a little further away or take, like, a wider path around.

[Lucy White]

So the reason that he looks like.

[Adrian Plouffe]

A dog is why Mother Nature is an incredible inventor. So why would we have to go and try to design something when we already have a design that's been thought of for us that. That we know physically is functional? So if we don't have to do any of the work to design what, like, a knee looks like or what a shoulder looks like, why would we do all that work?

[Jane Lindholm]

And then so can Squidward go upstairs?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Squidward can go up and downstairs.

[Lucy White]

Wow.

[Jane Lindholm]

And this looks like Squidward's head. But is this part of the tool?

[Adrian Plouffe]

This is part of the tool. So that is the arm that is attached to Spot. So the arm adds a whole bunch of additional capabilities to what he can do. So now instead of just walking around and taking pictures, Spot can go open doors and close doors. It can pick up things or, like, flip switches or valves for us too.

[Jane Lindholm]

And when it's time for Squidward or Spot to go to sleep, how do you put him to sleep?

[Adrian Plouffe]

He does it on his own. He goes back to his dock, sits down, charges up, and then he's ready for the next mission.

[Jane Lindholm]

Can you make him roll over?

[Adrian Plouffe]

Absolutely. We can make him roll over. What kind of dog doesn't roll over? And one of his favorite things, belly rubs.

[Lucy White]

Spot is really cool, and it does look and move like a dog, although it has a giant neck and a grasping arm instead of a head, which can be kind of weird looking. But still, you could easily think of Spot like a pet dog and imagine it's happy when it gets a belly rub or get annoyed when someone steps in front of it. That idea that inanimate, non human, non alive objects have thoughts and feelings like humans do is called anthropomorphism. It's a tendency that we have to relate to non human things by assuming that they're like us. But Spot isn't human. It's not even a dog. It can move on its own. It can climb stairs and avoid obstacles. And Lucy and Adrian say lots of their robots seem to have their own personalities. So is Spot, and are other robots alive?

[Various Kids]

My name is Rafa. I'm four years old. I live in Melbourne, Australia. And my question is, are robots alive?

[Elisha]

I don't think that they're alive. When you think about it, humans have to build a robot, turn it on, and tell it what to do. A robot can't think by itself and it doesn't eat food. So I don't think they're alive. And if you think about a car, a car won't turn on or move until a human gets into it and drives it. So based on that, I don't think it's alive.

[Lucy White]

Robots are not alive. They, they are built and controlled by humans. They don't breathe on their own, they don't eat, they can't reproduce and create new robots, and they don't have consciousness, meaning they don't have a sense of themselves or have emotions. But it can be confusing. Some robots are designed to look like they're alive. They can react to new situations without having to be programmed to do something specific. And as technology improves, robots can even seem like they're thinking and responding to us on their own. Plus, there are tons of movies and books that imagine what it would be like if robots came to life and maybe took over the world.

[Elisha]

Yeah, I think that that is interesting that we sometimes will say a robot's seeing something or it's thinking or it knows to do something. It does something that we didn't expect it to. But really humans are the ones with the brains and the imagination. So when we see a robot that's moving on its own, we think, oh, it can see, and oh, it can hear. But really, you just have to remember that humans are the ones that built the robots and put the sensors in the robots to tell it what to do.

[Various Kids]

My name is Rohan and I live in New York City and I'm five years old. Do robots cry?

[Lucy White]

No. Robots don't spontaneously cry, at least not because they're upset or sad or anything like that. But I'm sure someone has made a robot that sheds tears because it's been programmed to do that. Before we stop this episode today, Lucy and Adrienne wanted to make sure that if you're interested in robots, you know that there are lots of ways to work with them as you get older. Lucy and Adrian are both engineers and they recommend studying engineering as a good pathway to a career in robotics. But a good place to start is just having fun in science and math and even playing games like Legos or taking a computer programming course after school.

[Elisha]

I would ask your parents to look for different after school activities that might be under the name STEM. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. At GlobalFoundries, we work with different schools and libraries to put on after school activities for kids in our area to play with robots. Having a passion for robots is the most important thing. Science and math is hard and it takes practice to be able to do it well. So if you don't think you're good at science and math, don't be discouraged.

[Lucy White]

Thanks to Lucy White and Adrienne Plouffe at GlobalFoundries for helping us understand how robots work. Extra thanks to Gina de Rossi, Marvin Montague and otto funke at GlobalFoundries for helping us get access to these robots. That's it for this episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using an app like Voice Memos. Tell us your first name, where you live and how old you are along with your question. Then email the file to questionsutwhykids.org we can't answer every question we get, but we love listening to all of them and definitely use them to help understand what we should be doing episodes about. But why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm at Vermont Public. Special thanks to Joey Palumbo and Kaylee Mumford for their help with this episode. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds and we're distributed by prx. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then, stay curious.

[Adrian Plouffe]

From PRX.