Robotics Bootcamp
The robotics Bootcamp was one on its own, it was an amazing experience which took place at Tunapanda Institute. Thanks to the amazing efforts of the team members and the Powered by Tunapanda Circle purpose of forming partnerships with local and international organizations to create impact by bridging digital divides.
Tunapanda Institute partnered with Kubuka a Spanish Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) which promotes educational programmes and initiatives that favour entrepreneurship and social inclusion in communities.
The Bootcamp went for a week from Monday to Friday with the sessions running from 8 am to 2 pm with preceding trainer Brian and coaches from both Tunapanda and Kubuka organization. With a total of 13 kids of 9–14 years the sessions were full of fun activities. They got to learn about robotics and some of the course purposes from Tunapanda’s side were:
- Learn communication, teamwork and growth mindset by assembling the Lego Mindstorm Ev3 bots from scratch.
- Ensuring the kids acquire programming skills.
- Programming the bots to move, make sounds, sense objects and halt, lift objects and more.
3. Work as a team and find solutions to the challenges posed to them.
4. Design, develop, and run a working program on the bots to perform the commands they want.
The sessions kicked off on a Monday morning the kids and the team from Kubuka were very punctual as to the agreements made on earlier. The first day started with a brief outline of what is expected of everyone on the Bootcamp and what they will learn throughout the camp.
Fast forward to the robotics Lego Mindstorms curriculum day one and two activity, assembling parts of a robot to come up with RAC3 TRUCK which took two days for groups to complete, were they built on communication skills and teamwork in different groups.
The third day was more of theory, the kids learnt about Motors and sensors in a Lego mind storm Ev3 bot and what they do. The fourth day was focused on programming the bots to move forward,backward and use sensors. The last day the groups came with programs that they worked on from morning.
The kids were energetic and ready to learn this made the sessions very active. Through the days we normally kicked off with some brainstorming from the previous sessions where the kids could highlight what they had learned the previous day and ended with Takehome this is anything new someone has learned from the daily activities.
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamine Fankline
I do, You do, We do. Was the slogan of the week. Where a trainer teaches something then you take it into practice and do it, afterward the whole group tries to do it so that is fully clear on how something is done in case one missed anything on the two processes. It sure was a good way to learn. Over the days the sessions got even more interesting as one couldn’t help to notice the kids were arriving way earlier anticipating to learn new things.
It was a good and fun week, had lots of fun and most of all we made the robotics curriculum impact to the community.
