Students in Japan have the distinction of being the very first in the world to have a robot teacher! The humanoid named Saya is multilingual, can do roll calls and set tasks from text books. "She" has a latex face, modeled on a university student, controlled by 18 motors to create expressions including happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, sadness and even anger.

Saya will start teaching full-time after passing a trial term at a Tokyo primary school. Her creator, science professor Hiroshi Kobayashi, had been working on the robot for 15 years.