Using GATE to drive robots at Headstart 2019

In collaboration with Headstart (a charitable trust that provides hands-on science, engineering and maths taster courses), the Department of Computer Science has just run its fourth annual summer school for maths and science A-level students. This residential course ran from 8 to 12 July 2019 and included practical work in computer programming, Lego robots, and project development as well as tours of the campus and talks about the industry.

For the third year in a row, we have included a section on natural language processing using GATE Developer and a special GATE plugin (which uses the ShefRobot library available from GitHub) that allows JAPE rules to operate the Lego robots.  As before, we provided the students with a starter GATE application (essentially the same as in last year's course) containing just enough gazetteer entries, JAPE, and sample code to let them tweet variations like "turn left" and "take a left" to make the robot do just that.  We also use the GATE Cloud Twitter Collector, which we have modified to run locally so the students can set it up on a lab computer so it follows their own twitter accounts and processes their tweets through the GATE application, sending commands to the robots when the JAPE rules match.

Based on lessons learned from the previous years, we put more effort into improving the instructions and the Twitter Collector software to help them get it running faster.  This time the first robot started moving under GATE's control less than 40 minutes from the start of the presentation, and the students rapidly progressed with the development of additional rules and then tweeting commands to their robots.

The structure and broader coverage of this year's course meant that the students had more resources available and a more open project assignment, so not all of them chose to use GATE in their projects, but it was much easier  and more streamlined for them to use than in previous years.

This year 42 students (14 female; 28 male) from around the UK attended the Computer Science Headstart Summer School.

Geography of male students

Geography of female students

The handout and slides are publicly available from the GATE website, which also hosts GATE Developer and other software products in the GATE family.  Source code is available from our GitHub site.  

GATE Cloud development is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 654024 (the SoBigData project).