As part of Rolls-Royce’s "House of the Little Scientists" ambassador programme in Dahlewitz, a few of Rolls-Royce volunteers visited our partner schools and kindergartens. Rolls-Royce supports local STEM activities to get girls and boys interested in science and technology at an early age.
We brought four LEGO robots along to Niederheide primary school to inspire 18 3rd grade pupils. The aim was to familiarise the children to program sequences, error analysis and forward-looking approaches.
After introducing the four teams to the simple user interface of the app and robot control, the children were able to experiment to find out what works, but also which of their ideas could not be implemented.
In the second lesson, a challenge was set to test the performance of the robots. Each team were awarded points depending on how far each robot progressed.
Each team had three attempts and went through the following steps:
- Programming
- Trying out
- Analysing errors
- Reprogram
- Repeat
Unfortunately, none of the robots were able to make it to the finish line, but many of the ideas and suggestions for improvements were eagerly discussed and analysed.
The two lessons were such a success that we repeated the exercise with another class in January.
Furthermore, our ambassadors took the robots to their kindergartens and schools to inspire the children, who one day could be our future colleagues.