Jeff sits down with Eric Schweikardt of Modular Robotics to talk about STEM education in today's classrooms. Learn how your students can learn programming skills through Modular Robotics interlocking Cubelets to create amazing robotic projects.

Modular Robotics is home to more than 50 people who design, engineer and manufacture tiny robots. Every day, we work to build robot construction systems for kids because we believe that toys shape the way children think about the world. Our goal is to create remarkable fun play experiences that impart an intuitive understanding of complex systems and design thinking. Our team is comprised of engineers, software developers production specialists and operators.

• Website: www.modrobotics.com
• Blog: www.modrobotics.com/blog
• Twitter: @modrobotics
• Facebook:www.facebook.com/modrobotics
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/modrobotics

Eric Schweikardt is a designer of tools, robots, architecture and software. He develops concurrent and distributed physical systems with the intention of understanding more about the natural world through model-building. He designed and built roBlocks, a modular robotic construction kit, and is working on evolutionary algorithms for automated design.

Eric finished his PhD in Computational Design in 2008 from Carnegie Mellon University, and is now a visiting scientist at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory in Ithaca, New York. He studied architecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder and returned there to teach digital modeling and animation. He founded the Allegory Design Group, a web development studio specializing in 3D user interfaces, and worked as a consultant creating architectural renderings and animation for Michael Tavel Architects, Hobbs Design, Wolff Lyon Architects and DKahn Studio.

Eric’s undergraduate research was concerned with pen-based interfaces and the apparent divide between sketching and design development in architecture. This work resulted in Digital Clay, a program that interprets a designer’s isometric (3D) sketches as digital models. Eric has presented work at conferences on Human Computer Interaction (ICMI, TEI), Computer-Aided Design (ACADIA), and Intelligent Toys (DIGITAL).