The robot knew a name

Text C: an original fiction extract.

Rina's technology club built a wheeled greeter for the school open evening. Its square face displayed two bright eyes, and its arms lifted when a visitor approached the demonstration table. Rina had helped prepare the spoken greetings. People who wanted to take part could choose a name for a demonstration card; a printed code on the card linked to that name in the team's programme. When the machine read the code, it spoke the greeting. The team tested their own cards several times and enjoyed hearing a box on wheels welcome them as though it had been waiting for them personally.

For the display, Rina wrote “Meet our friendly robot” above a photograph. She did not claim it could recognise faces. She also did not explain how the greeting worked, because she thought the hidden process made the encounter more entertaining. Her job was to help visitors hold the card where the reader could detect it. At first, the demonstration went smoothly. A child held up a card, heard his chosen name and waved back. His father said the robot had remembered him. Rina smiled and moved to the next visitor without answering.

A few minutes later, two friends exchanged cards. The greeter welcomed each with the other's name. They laughed, but a younger child looked worried and asked whether the machine had become confused about who they were. Rina began saying that it had made a mistake, then stopped. It had correctly read the cards presented to it. Her explanation would make the mechanism seem more human precisely where the demonstration had shown that it was not identifying a person. The cheerful eyes had encouraged an interpretation which the machine's actual task did not support.

Another visitor asked whether the robot liked some children more than others. Her daughter's card had been turned backwards, so the machine had remained silent. Rina turned it round and the greeting played. The practical problem was small, but the visitor's question stayed with her. A moving arm and a spoken name could look like attention, while a failure to read a code could look like rejection. Telling everyone that it was only a machine would not explain why this particular machine had behaved differently on two attempts.

The club paused briefly to change the presentation. They put the reader beside a diagram linking card, code and selected greeting. One member demonstrated swapping cards and asked visitors to predict what the robot would say. The result became less like a secret trick and more like something people could investigate. Children still smiled when the arms lifted. Several stayed longer to ask how the team had made the display change. Rina distinguished the visible performance from claims about feelings or recognising faces, and referred questions beyond her part of the project to another member rather than guessing.

At the end, she replaced the heading with “A greeting from a code: try our club's prototype”. The first title remained in her notebook beside a note about the unanswered remark from the father. She had thought accuracy meant avoiding a sentence which was literally false. The evening showed her that silence could leave a mistaken explanation standing too. The robot had not become less interesting when its limits were explained. Rina had given the visitors a different kind of surprise: the chance to understand what they had just seen.

You are Rina. Write your answers for a student-website interview about the club’s robot demonstration.

In your response:

• What did the team build, and why did your original presentation seem appealing?
• What did visitors’ reactions reveal about the explanation you were giving?
• How did you change the demonstration, and what would you advise other student presenters?

Base your response on Text C, developing its ideas in your own words. Write about 250 to 300 words. Up to 10 marks are available for reading and up to 10 marks for writing.