Robotics Incursion (free)

We don’t currently do incursions.

Caterpillar avatarThe Robotics Incursion is suitable for Senior Primary (primarily year 5 and 6 students, year 4 students in a composite class is fine).

We come to your school for approx 1.5 to 2 hours, and work with either one classroom or a few (often in the school hall, to have enough space).

Note: to maintain optimal interactivity, it is important that the group isn’t too large (no more than 50 students).

Content

We explore with the students what robotics means for them, uses in the real world (past, present and science fiction), try to “program” a human to walk around the room using basic commands (primitives) to move specific joints, and discuss some of the future and ethics.  The incursion is in the form of an interactive conversation between the facilitator and the students, with “unplugged” activities.

OpenSTEM caterpillar (photo: Arjen Lentz)
OpenSTEM caterpillar (photo: Arjen Lentz)

Students have a chance to see a few robots live in action, such as our own autonomous 3D printed caterpillar and a hexapod (6-legged robot), and sometimes the Mirobot turtle robot that students build in our senior primary program. We answer questions, and show in detail how our own low-cost “homebrew” robots are put together.

OpenSTEM's Hexaplod (image: Marc Merlin)
OpenSTEM’s Hexaplod (image: Marc Merlin)

Background

Mirobot v2This incursion contains a tweaked subset of the initial “Meeting Robots” session from our popular Introduction to Robotics & Programming school program.

It provides an excellent opportunity for students, teachers and OpenSTEM facilitators to get to know each other.

Availability

We don’t currently do incursions.