When hundreds of students flocked to the Shangri-La Hotel in Jakarta on Sunday to discover what kind of education Canada has to offer, one of the first people many met was a robot.

A woman’s face peered out of a computer screen on top of a meter-high post fixed to a wheeled base. The post was dressed in a black T-shirt bearing the acronym DTUCS, which stands for Ding The Universe Canadian [learning] System. The robot trundled around the lobby, approaching and surprising future university students with a cheery: “Hi!”

While most of the institutions presenting at the semi-annual EduCanada Fair were in Jakarta to attract Indonesians to their campuses in North America, Angela Kasendi, the woman controling and speaking through the mechanical avatar, was offering to start teaching high school students next year in an international school in Tangerang – even as she herself remained in the western Canadian city of Vancouver.

“I have been teaching English, French and social studies for 20 years,” Kasendi said, “but this is my first year robotic teaching.”

Most of the presenters at the fair, however, were normal flesh and blood people from about 35 institutions that hoped to lure Indonesia’s best and brightest.

“We are here to give students information and options about studying in Canada,” said Richard Payne, a recruiter for the University of the Fraser Valley. “We want to make them aware of how Canada is a wonderful place where they would be welcome.”

Payne said his university already has two students from Indonesia who are pursuing joint degrees in business and aviation.

Among the hundreds of high school students who crowded into the EduCanada Fair to speak with Payne and other recruiters was 16-year-old Erick Tanamal Widjaja of Jakarta. “I am here to find a university, like 90 percent of the people here,” he said.

Erick wants to study business management or marketing to take advantage, he said, of his power of persuasion. He said he is interested in Canada because “Canadians are nice” and the country is safer and less populated that most. “I am hesitant about UBC [University of British Columbia] or U of T [University of Toronto] because I don’t like crowds. I should be used to them, but I’m not.”

Axel Puspowidjono, also 16, said he was told either Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia or Waterloo University in Ontario would best suit his needs. “I’m still not sure, but I may study about math,” he said. “I’m still thinking about it, still searching for what I want to be.”

Josephine Andina, 16, said she was considering applying to UBC.

“I’ll probably take environmental sciences,” she said. “I think the future is about renewable energy.”

If they are accepted they will be among about 1,300 Indonesians who study in Canada every year. Peter MacArthur, Canada’s ambassador to Indonesia, said students from the archipelago are among the most sought-after. “Indonesians have a very high acceptance rate of 97 percent,” he said. “Most countries are not so high. I won’t mention the name of the country, but one has a 97 percent rejection rate.”

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