Kids are the ultimate beta testers. As soon as they figure out what a new technology is for, they try to make it do something else. They push boundaries, break rules, play with possibilities and share their results in real time.
When I see how my son and his friends play Minecraft, I see the future of engineering and technology — and it’s an exciting one.
Minecraft is like an immersive digital Lego set. It lets you build whole worlds out of a few simple categories of digital bricks. Then you can invite your friends or anybody with a Minecraft account to enter those worlds and interact with them, change them or create parallel worlds based on yours.

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Not content with automating everyday urban living, robots are now taking to the rural countryside to assist farmers with their everyday tasks. What’s more, these armies of bot companions are buddying up with drones to create the future-connected fields of the 21st century.
The Ida Bot, as the ground bots are called, uses radio identification tags attached to trees to work out its routing. For example, a farmer can input that trees four and seven need chemicals, and when the bot senses the appropriate tag in its vicinity, it will start spraying.

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Farming, the oldest industry on the planet, has been slow to adapt new technology. But that should change in the near future, as farmers increasingly turn to robots to do everything from driving tractors and picking crops to deciding what sort of seeds to plant and where to plant them.
Experts say that robotic technology is needed for farms to cope with labor shortages, as they boost productivity to supply the increasing amounts of food that the world's growing population will demand in the years ahead.
"In 1950, each farmer had to produce enough food for 10 people," explains Susan Eustis of WinterGreen Research, a Lexington, Mass.-based forecasting firm. "By 2014, he had to produce enough for 150." By early in the next decade, with the help of technology, "we think he'll be producing enough food to feed 500."
Eustis predicted that by 2020, global agriculture will be spending $25 billion a year on robotics — not including aerial drones, which already are being used to keep an eye on crops.

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Not content with automating everyday urban living, robots are now taking to the rural countryside to assist farmers with their everyday tasks. What’s more, these armies of bot companions are buddying up with drones to create the future-connected fields of the 21st century.
The Ida Bot, as the ground bots are called, uses radio identification tags attached to trees to work out its routing. For example, a farmer can input that trees four and seven need chemicals, and when the bot senses the appropriate tag in its vicinity, it will start spraying.
“It automatically, without human intervention, applies the chemicals, and it does so at very low pressure,” Josh Griffin, assistant engineering professor at Northwest Nazarene University and project leader, said in a report published Sunday. “The chemicals go where we want them to go, and not overspray.”

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As Detroit car makers and Silicon Valley tech giants vie to bring driverless cars to U.S. roads, one of the world’s largest tractor makers is looking to do the same down on the farm.
Case IH, the agricultural-machinery unit of CNH Industrial NV, this week unveiled a sleek, aggressive-looking red-and-black machine at the annual Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa.
This tractor -- CNH calls it the Autonomous Concept Vehicle -- has one obvious difference compared with more conventional models: there’s no cab for a driver. Instead, it comes equipped with cameras, radar and GPS, allowing a farmer to remotely monitor planting and harvesting via an app on a tablet computer, the company’s Brand President Andreas Klauser said in an interview Wednesday as crowds gathered around the machine to snap photographs.

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Today we had our first sessions of Robotics! It was run by Scott Groombridge fromRobots in Schools. We used instructions from the iPad app to build our first robot with LEGO. It was a lot of fun. The students stretched their collaboration learning muscles working together. They had to really use their noticing muscles to follow the instructions. We were all absorbed in our learning. Here is a video with photos from the 9:00 group.

Hong Kong (CNN)A robot directs you to your stadium seat, while artificial meteorites streak across the sky.
Down below, hundreds of performers decked out in traditional Japanese costumes glide through the arena.You take all this in, as a multilingual translation app on your smartphone describes what's going on.
It sounds like science fiction, but this is the crazy vision that Japan wants to bring to life.
Welcome to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics -- an event that Japan hopes will symbolize the country's high-tech cool, and draw in visitors.

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Robots could soon be milking thousands of cows at a big dairy farm in Chile.
A Chilean farm said this week that it would install milking robots at its farm of 6,500 cows, which it claims would make it the biggest robotic milking farm in the world. The claim could not be verified. After the installation, 4,500 cows will be milked by the machine, according to a spokesperson.
A Swedish dairy technology company called DeLaval built the 64 milking robots for the farm. Of those, 16 have been installed, which the farm said has resulted in a 10 % increase in milk production and an unspecified reduction in labor costs.

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