School project about building
and programming of robots

The project aims to spark school children's interest for engineering and mathematics at an early age. The children are motivated to build and program robots and enable them to find the exit of a labyrinth. The maze is represented by white tape on a dark ground. First, the children obtained a general education in manifold applications of robots in today’s and future live - with many examples such as manufacturing of cars over walking robots, robot soccer and mars missions to nano robots in medicine.
An introduction to programming followed. The problems became gradually more difficult. It started with simple programs that should cause the robots to drive a given route or to stop if there was an obstacle in their way. It continued with more complicated tasks like following a white line on dark ground or driving-instructions which depended on logical combinations of various sensory information.

It is important that the education of children is also
challenging. Many children waste their time in front of a TV or video game and don’t work on projects on their own. Consequently, they don’t
develop the ability to solve problems. It is instructive for children to try working with a long term project for which solutions only emerge if they are working for them. Many educational approaches present both problems and solutions as one complete package which doesn’t motivate active, self-dependant thinking. That is the point where we want to offer more than a normal school is doing today, for interested youngsters who might one day be our students at DTU.

The pictures show the school project with children from the Danish-German private school Sankt Petri Skole (http://www.sankt-petri.dk/) which was the first school to carry out the project.