ISTE 2023 Recap

The UBTECH Education team just returned from ISTE 2023 in Philadelphia, and we had a great time! It was great for our national team to get together, enjoy what Philly had to offer, and share what we do with the ISTE audience. Some highlights include seeing new edtech products, running into friends and partners, and more importantly, getting to share our UKITs with educators.

Our booth was located in the center of the conference hall (sorry if you missed us!). We have a new setup this year which includes an easy-to-assemble backdrop that we feel is quite eye-catching. We also unveiled new swag, including light-up logo pens and stickers! Our setup was great, but the show-stopper was of course our robots.

We had a variety of robots from all of our kits, including fan favorites like the Owl, Trolley, and Golf Club robots. In addition, we brought a custom robot built by a member of our tech ops team. This robot, aptly named PoseBot, uses a computer’s webcam to track people based on body outline and eye line and responds when a gesture (like right arm up) is recognized by having the robot imitate the movement. This bot can recognize and copy five unique poses using an AI pose recognition algorithm. The PoseBot was built with the UKIT Advanced and programmed using uCode with the preloaded pose recognition AI blocks – we suggest you check our AI blocks out!

In addition to showing off our cool robots, we were excited to announce that our AI Foundations curriculum is now free with any UKIT purchase! This K-12 unplugged AI curriculum is great for educators who want to teach the building blocks of AI and CS without being too techy – even for our techy teachers we know how techy AI can be!

We were so inspired by all the cool new robotic kits, edtech teaching tools, and all things ISTE that we wanted to collect ideas from all our STEM enthusiasts on the direction we should go with our next robotic kit, so we started a survey! We got some great feedback, but we need more. If you made it this far in this blog, please give us three more minutes and complete this survey. Unfortunately, we can’t give you any cool swag or light-up pens, but we still appreciate your input!

All in all, ISTE was a huge success! The conversations we had and the friendships we made will go down as a huge win. We hope to see you next year at ISTE 2024 in Denver!