Robot Basics
The most basic definition of robotics (that everyone agrees upon) is that it is a science that uses technology to design and make machines that do very specific tasks -- and which can also react to the environment in some way.
The line between what we call a robot varies from culture to culture (Japan's definition is a bit differen than ours) -- and the forms that the robots take are different from ours as well. Most robots today are used to make cars and appliances, or to work in some areas of nuclear plants and chemical plants where it woule be too dangerous for a human. The military and police also use robots to defuse bombs and to look into places where they think snipers might hide. Although robots in "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" do some very human things, our robots of today are a long way from being able to do those things. Most don't look very human -- and, in fact, many people would find a fully human-looking robot to be a creepy device.
There are internet robots that have no physical body, but are simply programs that do certain types of tasks. Usually they browse through the web looking for information and retrieving it for their owner. "Web spiders" (used by the search engine companies" are a type of web robot (called "bot" or "webbot") that search web pages, index them, and bring back the results to the search engine (like Google or Yahoo.) Other, more controversial ones, are software agents that do "bid sniping" on Ebay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot
It's useful to know about other types of robots, because classroom discussions may bring them up. For further reading on robot basics, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot
Wikipedia is not entirely correct about the history of robotic things. The oldest story of something we might call a robot comes from ancient Sumeria (around 5,000 years ago or so); the story of a child of stone that grew so huge it threatened to shake the skies down.
