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Education Programming

School Field Trips: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Smithsonian 24

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
theodp writes: On Thursday evening, Amazon is hosting a national field trip of sorts, inviting kids and teachers to take part in a Twitch livestream tour inside an Amazon robotics fulfillment center with the goal of inspiring students to learn about robotics and to "illustrate the importance of a computer science education." From the press release: "On the tour, students will see first-hand how teams of associates work alongside robotic technologies to fulfill customer orders. They will see where inventory items are stowed into the system, learn how robots bring storage pods to our associates to pick customer items, and finally, they'll see trucks being loaded with thousands of customer orders." Hey, "program, or be programmed," as they warn kids and parents over at Amazon-bankrolled Code.org!
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School Field Trips: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Smithsonian More

School Field Trips: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Smithsonian

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  • Thats used to be comedy, not a documentary.

  • Better hide the piss-pots first! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday October 17, 2019 @09:36PM (#59320968)
    Perhaps the children will get unintended lessons on what the future of casual, deregulated, "gig economy" jobs look like. Perhaps the children should read some Dickens before they go to get a better idea of the conditions Amazon warehouse workers work under.

    • "Programm or be programmed" - at least they are giving them a fair warning and trying to spark their interest in rather becoming someone who builds those treadmills...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Falos ( 2905315 )

      *wish they could work under

  • No doubt a Twitch tour is all the rage these days, but recently a group of girl scouts got a real tour in a real Amazon warehouse.

    From what I heard, it was like the Scared Straight scenes of old in which children were terrified to the extent that they would never do anything to get themselves into such a situation when they grew up.

    Read or listen to Molly Wood give the full report:
    https://www.marketplace.org/sh... [marketplace.org]

  • theodp really hates code.org. The kids are gonna take his jerb.

  • Yes! Get the kids excited to work on the line at Amazon early on. Jeff's fortunes are depending on the children!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      There's very little education in these Amazon robots.

      "Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong."

  • I want a tour of the Kerblam! warehouse..

  • Such crap. My field trips were to tide pools to see aquatic life or the the Museum of Man and Museum of Natural History in Balboa Park, San Diego. This is Amazon Indoctrination Camp.

  • I looked at the video referenced https://www.twitch.tv/videos/4... [twitch.tv].
    Nothing about it is inspiring.
    Weird, freaky, disorienting, darkly comical, but not inspiring.

    My first thought was the Seinfeld episode where George tries to rescue the Frogger arcade game where he had the high score, trying to move the box across the street.
    Sokoban, the box moving strategy game is another analogy.

    I watched a few times, and focused and followed a few individual yellow carts. It all looked more like Brownian motion than a mer

    • I don't know if that is the real operations or they just staged something for the camera, but it seemed painfully slow and inefficient.

      Efficiency of a warehouse operation depends on many factors, but the speed at which boxes move around is really not one of them. Much more important:

      * The average time that an item spends stored in the warehouse. Compare with a brick-and-mortar shop: if an item sits on the shelves but never bought, it just takes up shelve space. Not to mention shopkeeper paid for it @ one point without seeing a corresponding sale. That's the kind of thing you generally want to avoid.
      * That items find their way to the c

  • Would you care if it wasn't Amazon? Like say if they were going to a train depot to marvel at the engineering there or something?

  • As a kid we had field trips to museums. But we also had trips to the local businesses, especially ones with a lot of automation. In my area they had a mass production bakery (Freihofer's) so back in the 1980's we got to see huge mixing bowls, doughnut making machines, all making mass produced products. Showing the workers in the factory not actually doing the baking, but quality control, and reconfiguration the system for a different batch etc.... Also Apple Cider and Milk factories were popular too.
    For

    • My great-great-etc grandfather would tell a similar tale.

      "As a kid we had field trips to museums. But we also had trips to the local businesses, especially ones with a lot of slaves. In my area they had a mass production plantation so back in the 1780's we got to see large groups of pickers in the fields, huge ginning lines, long cotton washing lines, all making mass produced products. Showing the owners on the plantation not actually doing the processing, but quality control, and reconfiguration of the

  • goal of inspiring students to learn about robotics

    Is Amazon hoping they'll get kids to be excited about "cool robots," and work there in the future?

  • At a fulfillment center???

    Robot: What is my purpose?

    Rick: Pass the butter.

    Robot: What is my purpose?

    Rick: You pass butter.

    Robot: Oh my god

    Rick: Yeah, welcome to the club pal.

    Next scene image of robot blowing it's brains out because it works at an Amazon fulfillment center

  • This seems to me just an extension of the 'everybody should learn to code' propaganda designed to a) drive down the cost of implementing tech and b) hasten the time when tech will mimic human labour so effectively that said labour will (largely) no longer be required.

    Of course, when that time arrives we COULD all be living lives of relative ease - any bets on that happening?

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