St Andrews students embark on an exciting AI project: Linking Nord Anglia’s "Misty the Robot" with ChatGPT

St Andrews International School Bangkokstarted a new project in July 2024 this year, implementing Misty the Robot in an educational setting and conducting a research project on artificial intelligence. The project is led by our Head of Robotics, Mr Rob Parker, working with three very talented Year 12 and Year 13 students – Anish, Sanyam and Alyssa.

Misty was sent to us at St Andrews Bangkok by the Digital Lab at Nord Anglia in London, with the aim for her to be integrated into learning support at our school. This trial run is led by our Director of Whole School Learning Support, Ms Catherine McCluskey, and her team at thePrimary Schoolafter visiting another Nord Anglia school in Doha earlier this year.

AI integration

Over the summer, Mr Rob and the three senior students at St Andrews Bangkok started an exciting project: attempting to integrate Misty the Robot with conversational AI to explore her capabilities in a learning environment. After extensive research, testing various programming languages, and lots of debugging errors with hardware and code along the way, they managed to get Misty up and running. The team has since had the chance to explore how to implement a real world project into an educational environment.

Fostering potential

Like with any real world project, these students have had to conduct extensive research and learn by trial and error how to debug problems with Misty's hardware. They have successfully been able to link Misty to ChatGPT and are currently looking at ways to get her to respond to senses when humans interact with her, and provide responses to emotion.

“The students have learned how to write complex programs to translate speech to text and find a way to upload this to Misty and onto ChatGPT, using both the knowledge base on Misty as well as artificial intelligence language models. This has great potential for future applications, and I can’t wait to see how we can implement this as a way to enhance education.”

— Rob Parker, Head of Robotics at St Andrews Bangkok

This project is a long way from finished. Recently, these students had the opportunity of presenting their research to the Regional Managing Director SEAMEI from Nord Anglia's Head Office, Mr Shaun Williams, along with the Board of Directors from St Andrews International School Bangkok. Anish, Sanyam, and Alyssa shared their research and proposed the idea of making Misty a collaborative research project across Nord Anglia schools, in order to push the capabilities of implementing this robot as an educational tool.

Stay posted for more on Misty the Robot. A special thanks to Anish, Sanyam, Alyssa, and Mr Rob for all of their incredible work.