The APE.Robotics team teach 14-year-olds to construct robots.
Remember the scene from Star Wars where the rebels are all gathered in a briefing room looking at slides of Death Star plans. A similar atmosphere was to be found at the Petnica science center recently. The APE.Robotics team, whom we wrote about more than once, held a Robotics 101 class in front of Elementary school students, as part of Petnica's Summer Science School.
The kids learned about what it takes to make a robot through the story of APE Robotics and their struggles to construct one for the National Eurobot competition – the one with a bunch of MikroE hardware in its innards.
It's a story of problem-solving that starts much before the actual construction of the robot (the fun part) begins. Humans that construct robots are not robots themselves and it takes a lot of organizational and communicational skills to facilitate smooth teamwork.
The fun part wasn't skipped though, as the lecture also featured a technical segment where the APE team explained basic principles of robotics.
The APE.Robotics team themselves are graduates of Petnica (the largest science center in Southern Europe). It's a real show of gratitude on their part to see them invest their time into teaching and motivating new generations of attendees. Let's just hope none of them end up building a Death Star.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika