All work and no play makes industrial robot arms dull machines -- but Japan’s Denso Corp. has taken a step toward changing that.

The auto-parts giant last week displayed its high-tech robot arms, showing off traditional "kendama" ball-and-cup tricks at an exhibition in Chiba, Japan. According to the company, the machines were developed with students from three high schools, with the goal of having them learn the joy and challenges of programming a machine by themselves.

Denso’s VS-050 robot arms, typically used on factory assembly lines, were programmed to automatically pull the kandama ball in a swift movement and land it on a cup atop the wooden toy. The company and the students began the programming project in April. “The robot arms weren’t able to succeed with 100% accuracy, but most of the time they were able to complete a trick,” a spokesman at Denso said. Here is a video of the high school students working on the robot arms in a clip by Denso Corp. A clip by Yamagata Shimbun daily newspaper shows the robots at the exhibition in Chiba, Japan.

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