Robotics tournament for elementary schools – it is a Robots Week
The second day of the Robots Week is behind us, an event organized as part of the European City of Science Katowice 2024 celebrations. On Tuesday, the Robotics Tournament took place at the Silesian University of Technology, while in Katowice it was possible to visit laboratories at the Lukasiewicz Institute – EMAG.
The Robotic Exploration of SPACE tournament was held in two age categories: Class 4-6 and Class 7-8.
- “The teams carried out various tasks, including overcoming the maze of a remote-controlled robot, programming the route and driving the remotely controlled robot mBot2, as well as overcoming the obstacle course using a robot-dog” - said Dr Eng. Aldona Rosner, Curator of Robots Week.
The tournament was attended by pupils from schools from our region, among others from Primary School number 35 in Rybnik.
“We encourage our pupils to participate in such competitions and develop their skills in this area. In our school, learning programming begins already in kindergarten classes, where even three-year-olds begin their adventure with programming. Nowadays, this is of great importance, because this field is developing very dynamically” - said Ewa Tyl-Korzeniewska, the school's director.
After the competition, pupils could visit the Robotics Laboratories at the Faculty of Mining, Safety Engineering, and Industrial Automation of the Silesian University of Technology, see a robot playing chess and also visit the laboratories of the Academic Secondary Comprehensive School in Gliwice.
On the same day, during the Robots Week, secondary school pupils from the region had the opportunity to visit the laboratories of the Lukasiewicz Institute – EMAG in Katowice.
“First of all, we want to talk to young people and find out if they have contact with robots, what their attitudes are toward them, whether we should be afraid of them or rather cooperate with them,” said Martyna Dudzicz, one of the Institute’s experts. An important element of the meeting was the presentation on cybersecurity. After that, the participants visited laboratories where electromagnetic waves are investigated, or applications are tested.
“Because it’s a week of robots, we want to show how robots work. For example, a robot dressed in an avatar’s body as a virtual character can be used, for example, to communicate with deaf people. In this case, we are talking about a sign language avatar. We will show the results of our projects that we have implemented in this area” – added Adam Piasecki, leader of the Accessibility Plus research group in Lukasiewicz EMAG.
Almost three hundred people participated in the event.
“We don’t have too many opportunities to visit the laboratories of companies and institutions, so we took advantage of it. In a class with an extended English language and computer science profile, such workshops are most advisable, because we want to encourage the largest group to study in the future in technical and engineering fields” – said Izabela Markewka, the supervisor of one of the groups.
Other events in Robots Week are ahead of us. Details can be found here: https://program.miastonauki.pl/tydzien-robotow
Text by Jolanta Skwaradowska, Katarzyna Siwczyk.
Photos of Jolanta Skwaradowska, Maciej Mutwil, Jan Szady
