#^lr

As the driving force behind the robotics workshops we’ve been running, we invited Liam Ridgeway to share his perspectives on the first robotics workshop we ran late last year.  We hope you find Liam’s thoughts helpful, and we'd love to know what you think… ^GY

Late 2014 I (Liam Ridgeway), with Dr Robert Fitch (from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) and the Indigenous Digital Excellence (IDX) team, ran our first Indigenous Robotics Workshop program for kids aged 8–12 in the IDX Hub at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) campus in Redfern. 

The workshop is the first of many and is aimed at giving kids more exposure to Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) through an interactive workshop where the kids build and play with LEGO robots.

On the day we had 19 students from Glebe Primary School attend the workshop. We had 10 mentors that were spread across the student groups. Students and mentors enthusiastically gathered at 9:30am, buzzed for the day’s activities.

They were given an introduction to the workshop and what we were doing for the day and how this tied back to Culture.

They were then treated to an introduction to robotics by Robert, who showed the kids all the different ways that robots are used in everyday life.

Students were then split into groups of two (and one group of three) and assigned a mentor.

The mentors also had a really great day and the feedback was really amazing and also very constructive.

The kids worked in pairs and each pair had a mentor. As part of the workshop they had to come up with a team name.

Throughout the day the students were awarded stickers and certificates for completion of tasks, effort and good behaviour.

At the end of the day mentors came together to nominate and vote for students to receive certificated for students who demonstrated good behaviour, great results and most improved, and all students got to walk away for a chocolate, which even the big kids (mentors and teachers) were very excited about.

About the workshop content

The learning components of the workshop were structured to flow across the day, with an introduction to robotics concepts, followed by tasks related to the building and programming processes, which were then combined into a culturally-infused “challenge” task for the kids to practice (and demonstrate) the things they’d learnt.

We started by teaching the kids how to build a basic LEGO robot so they could become familiar with the different pieces of the robot.

We then moved onto teaching the kids how to command the robots to move using software to program into the robots memory to move in different directions.

The last activity of the day involved the children building a more complex robot which they would build and then program to move around a course with obstacles. The course was designed around significant landmarks across and territories within the Eora Nation.

This latter point highlights one of the things we’re committed to in the program—to meld a Cultural perspective with the digital learning activities.

We had so much great feedback from the students on the day asking to come back again. We also had a student say they wanted to study engineering and robotics at the university level. I was delighted to hear this feedback because this is exactly what I hope we can achieve with this program by using the robotics workshop as one of the many paths which exposes kids to opportunities in digital technology and STEM.

Based on this early success, we will be running our second pilot workshop in May and are looking to host more robotics workshops throughout the year. We also hope to find a group of students from our workshops who would be interested in creating a team to compete at the FIRST LEGO League Robotics competition.