Students at the Pearl Technology/ Richwoods Township STEM Academy had the opportunity to learn from, and operate cars of the future. The program focuses in on autonomous 1/18th- scale cars developed by Amazon Web Services. The cars- called AWS DeepRacers– learn through rewards and students' controls. It's a platform that only some engineers and developers have had an opportunity to experience. "In my day we didn't have these opportunities, but when you see kids that are fifth through eighth grade actually teaching cars how to drive themselves and that their thought process can get wrapped around artificial intelligence, it's an amazing thing to watch," said Dave Johnson, President of Pearl Technology.

There is a strong and natural relationship between robots and rubber duckies. Being small, cheap, colorful, and pleasingly compliant, duckies became a sort of physical Stanford Bunny--when you want to show the scale of a robot, or give a robot something to visually locate or grasp or something, just toss a duckie in there. This relationship was formalized through the 2016 ICRA conference, where duckies inspired a bunch of videos and some poetry that is surprisingly not terrible. Since then, duckies have been taking over in robotics--at this point, I'm fairly certain that Andrea Censi at ETH Zurich is held hostage by (and doing the bidding of) a small army of little yellow duckies. This would explain why an entire duckie village full of duckie-sized autonomous cars that you can learn how to program is now on Kickstarter, with the hope that you'll help them take over the entire world.