Robots that can learn new behaviors. Robots that can reproduce themselves. Science fiction? Not anymore. Roboticists at Cornell's Computational Synthesis Lab have developed just such engineered creatures that offer interesting implications for education. The team, headed by Hod Lipson, was intrigued by the question, "How can you get robots to be creative?" To answer it, the group set about making robots a different way. Instead of designing the machines manually with programs for every eventuality, the researchers created learning systems that would enable the robots to learn and evolve, more as children do. Using this evolutionary robotics approach, the researchers created simple, legged robots with eight motors and some basic circuitry to allow them to try out various behaviors and act on the consequences. While these robots are not quite ready for jobs in the classroom, the work of developing them may benefit educators. "How do you decide what problems to propose to a learning system so that it can gradually learn something?" asks Cornell's Lipson. "How do you generate incremental, successive problems such that each one is learnable?" Those are essential questions for educators as well as computational biologists.