School project
about building
and programming of robots
The project aims to spark school children's interest for
engineering and mathematics at an early age. The children
are motivated to build and program robots and enable them
to find the exit of a labyrinth. The maze is represented
by white tape on a dark ground. First, the children obtained
a general education in manifold applications of robots in
today’s and future live - with many examples such
as manufacturing of cars over walking robots, robot soccer
and mars missions to nano robots in medicine.
An introduction to programming followed. The problems became
gradually more difficult. It started with simple programs
that should cause the robots to drive a given route or to
stop if there was an obstacle in their way. It continued
with more complicated tasks like following a white line
on dark ground or driving-instructions which depended on
logical combinations of various sensory information.
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It is important that the education of children
is also
challenging. Many children waste their time in front of a
TV or video game and don’t work on projects on their
own. Consequently, they don’t
develop the ability to solve problems. It is instructive for
children to try working with a long term project for which
solutions only emerge if they are working for them. Many educational
approaches present both problems and solutions as one complete
package which doesn’t motivate active, self-dependant
thinking. That is the point where we want to offer more than
a normal school is doing today, for interested youngsters
who might one day be our students at DTU.
The pictures show the school project with children from the
Danish-German private school Sankt Petri Skole (http://www.sankt-petri.dk/)
which was the first school to carry out the project.
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