Gizmo the Robot! - B-School News

Meet Gizmo the Robot!

When a hospital needed a name for its robot surgeon, 4th graders had the perfect idea.

Courtesy of Hancock Health

The 4th-grade class at Sugar Creek Elementary and the surgical staff at Hancock Regional Hospital pose for a photo with the robot the students named Gizmo (back row, center).

4thA hospital in the United States has a new helper for complicated surgeries. Called Gizmo, this helper isn’t a doctor or a nurse. It’s a robot!

Robots can do many things. There are robots that help build cars, explore the deep sea, and help take care of people as they get older. Gizmo is a surgery robot at Hancock Regional Hospital in the U.S. state of Indiana. The robot will help perform certain surgeries, so surgeons don’t need to make so many incisions, or cuts. The robot arms can use tiny instruments and work in a smaller space, and cameras can magnify places the surgeon needs to look at. Overall, this means that patients can heal faster and don’t need to stay in the hospital as long.

Gizmo got its name with the help of some students from a nearby school after the hospital set up a naming contest for people from the community.

The 4th-grade class at Sugar Creek Elementary School entered the naming contest using a suggestion from student Lili Appleget. Appleget thought of the name Gizmo because it would be easy for kids to pronounce. “It will make kids more calm so when surgeons perform surgery kids will be less worried for surgery,” wrote Lili in the submission letter.

“Parents and kids will not be scared with a name like that! The name Gizmo sounds nice so kids start thinking about happy things,” Lili wrote.

As a prize for winning the naming contest, the 4th-grade class went on a field trip to Hancock Regional Hospital to see the robot in person and meet the doctors who perform surgery.

“This real-world experience has gotten students so excited to write and study robots more. The class is incredibly proud to know that an audience of important community members values their opinion,” Amanda Clawson, the 4th-grade teacher at Sugar Creek Elementary, told the Greenfield Daily Reporter.

The hospital staff are also happy that their new robot helper has a name. Steve Long, the president and CEO of Hancock Health, said, “We are thrilled to welcome Gizmo to Hancock Health’s surgical team and appreciate Mrs. Clawson’s 4th-grade students for coming up with such a creative name.”

Did You Know?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, 1929, 29.52.15), Photo Composite by Encyclopaedia Britannica, LLC

This clock, which was made in the 1600s, is also an automaton. The lion’s eyes and mouth move when the clock strikes on each hour.

Today’s robots can do so much! But even thousands of years ago, people were making simpler machines called automatons. Automatons are machines that are self-moving once they get started. Early automatons could play music, dance, and more!

Students Compete in Robot World Championship

Courtesy of Alton Strupp/REC Foundation

A member of the Dragon team from China competes in the final round of the 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship. The Dragon team was one of the winners of the event.

In May, elementary and middle school students from more than 30 countries traveled to the largest robotics competition in the world: the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas, Texas. More than 800 teams of four to six people competed in robotics challenges that tested their skills in building, coding, and driving the robots.

VEX Robotics is a company that provides schools with educational and competitive robotics products so that students can learn engineering, teamwork, and problem-solving.

How It Works

Each year, team members work together to create a robot that can complete certain challenges, like moving balls into a goal or collecting blocks. The students plan how the robot moves and write the computer code that tells the robot how to perform actions. There is also a driver who steers the robot.

The school teams participate in regional tournaments throughout the year. Their robot creations are judged on how well they perform the tasks. Some of the robotics challenges require teams to work together to score points against rival teams. These challenges help kids learn how to collaborate to meet a goal.

Teams that do well at these regional competitions can qualify for the world championship, where they compete against other robotics teams from around the world.

Courtesy of Alton Strupp/REC Foundation

Winning elementary and middle school teams from different categories pose together at the end of the 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship.

And the Winners Are…

This year’s world champions in the elementary competition are the Dragon Team from Beijing, China and BASIS International School Wuhan from Wuhan, China. The robot skills champion is the team called GuGuGaGa, from California in the United States.

What Can a Robot Do?

“Cheetah robots,” which have four legs, can run fast and are light on their feet.

Robots come in many shapes and sizes, and they can do many kinds of tasks. Some robots even go to space. Learn more about robots, and how they can help people, at Britannica!

Word of the Day

robot

Part of speech:

noun

Definition:

: a machine that can do the work of a person and that works automatically or is controlled by a computer

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