Queen City ISD welcomes Milo

So, who is Milo the Robot, and how does it help students with autism? Milo is a robot that was designed to help learners with autism spectrum disorder or ASD, learn and practice their communication and social skills.

Milo can walk, talk, model human facial expressions and more. It delivers consistent lessons in a way that many of the students respond well to, and can repeat lessons as many times as needed.

Milo can even do some fun things like dance, act like it’s swinging a baseball bat and tell the audience to stand up. It has a touch screen on the chest that allows students to control it or see their face as they’re watching it. The teacher and students use an iPad to facilitate the process while Milo delivers the instruction.

Karen Tromza the Director of Special Education at Queen City ISD wanted to learn more about Milo and how it could help students, so they scheduled a meeting with RoboKind to learn more about Robots4Autism.

According to the website, the organization “utilizes cutting edge facially expressive robots and tablet technology to deliver a curriculum addressing relevant social skills for school-aged children with autism.”

Robots4Autism’s comprehensive intervention program “uses purpose-built humanoid robots to deliver developmental instruction modules that teach critical functional skills.”

“We’re beyond excited to have welcomed Milo into our schools,” Tromza said. “We’ve begun to utilize him to service our students in our Autistic Support program all through our district. Denise Peek, our Speech and Language Pathologist, and assistant Katie Steward currently facilitate the instruction one-on-one with our students. The goal is to increase the frequency with which they get to interact with Milo, thus hoping to provide more consistent instruction and achieve quicker results. We eagerly anticipate the short- and long-term results that we foresee our students will achieve through this cutting-edge technology. We could not have gotten this going without the technological support of Shannon Henderson, Ed Oden and Roy Rogers.”