UA_Engineer_25_FINAL_spreads (1) - Flipbook - Page 12
“An example of what a student could build is a drone
application that makes a drone 昀氀y forward when you
clench your teeth.”
NeuroBlock is designed in collaboration with College
of Education faculty Feiya Luo and Amy Hutchinson for
students from fourth to 12th grade and allows them to
build using drag-and-drop logic.
“It allows us to create these novel experiences that
really inspire students and people to think about what’s
possible in the future,” Crawford said.
For some students, that hands-on engagement
is the 昀椀rst time they’ve seen themselves as future
engineers or coders.
“Maybe there’s this kid in rural Alabama that never
even thought about engineering or maybe never even
thought about computer science,” Crawford said. “And
they see this puppy robot and they’re like, ‘I’m hooked.’
That’s kind of a win for us and our agenda.”
Though Crawford’s primary goal is education, he
sees the technology having applications well beyond
the classroom. His lab has already had preliminary
conversations with the West Alabama Area Agency on
Aging about how a robot like PuppyPi could be adapted
to support older adults.
“There’s a lot of interesting ideas of how we could
use a puppy to assist the elderly population,” Crawford
said. “There’s a whole host of work in this area of
human-robot interaction.”
While Scuffy’s current payload capacity and software
are tailored toward learning, Crawford said he hopes
future versions can evolve for broader social uses.
“This idea of using a quadruped robot for
educational purposes has very limited knowledge
and we’re kind of on the cusp,” he said. “That’s what
makes it super exciting.”
The PuppyPi project is part of Crawford’s larger
National Science Foundation CAREER Award
12 | CAPSTONE ENGINEER | FALL 2025
acknowledgement and has received support from the
Alabama Power Foundation, allowing the team to expand
its work to additional counties in Alabama.
Previously, they’ve visited classrooms in Tuscaloosa,
Hale, Greene, Houston, Sumter and Pickens counties,
with plans to visit others.
“We’re approaching almost ten counties where
we’ve had some type of engagement throughout rural
Alabama,” Crawford said. “It’s really hard to take a guess
at how broad the impact will be. I run into students and
people that come to me and say, ‘I saw your student and
they graduated from this university and that student
remembered that they drove a drone with their brain.’
So, I think the impact spreads over time.”
If the PuppyPi work takes a similar approach to brain
drones, it could spread just as fast, and the inspiration it
sparks could lead to something even bigger.
“There’s a strong chance that the students who are
in our camps now will have opportunities 10 years from
now to use the tools, the computational ability and the
advancements in math and AI to actually build a system
that can achieve these goals that we have,” Crawford
said. “It’s a stronger chance that those students who
have been exposed to it in middle and high school would
have been aware of it and maybe they keep working
with it long enough to actually present us with
these breakthroughs.”
In Crawford’s view, PuppyPi is about programming
possibility. By putting advanced tools and ideas in front
of students now, especially in areas that rarely see them,
the hope is to open doors early enough to affect the
future positively. What began with a curious question
could one day grow into the kind of thinking that
reshapes industries, communities and lives.
ABOVE: Dr. Chris Crawford works with a student on coding
using the NeuroBlock platform; Members of Dr. Crawford’s
research team pose with Scuffy and another robot model.
