By Gretta Hohl
Published: January 23, 2015
During my winter break I found myself with a small suitcase filled with robots, microcontrollers and tools travelling in the night train fourteen hours down from Germany to Budapest. I felt relieved having cached a long nap due to the rhythmical swinging of the train and woke up in snow cowered winter landscape at Budapest Keleti main station. After a very short break with strong black coffee, I took my seat in the minibus driving directly to Satu Mare. I’m frequently doing this trip to the top western corner of Romania but this was different, since I planned robotics workshop for school students.
During my last summer visit, I got in touch with the school director of the native Hungarian high school Kölcsey Ferenc. While we discussed about my work as computer scientist and the robotics research I’ve done, she was pleasantly surprised to hear what technologies are developed in this area and told me how great it would be to introduce it to the school students. I told her about my activities as a TeachSurfer and suggested her to run a workshop for interested students on my next visit to the city. This is how it all started, and there I was standing in the border control for entering Romania, and wondering how the border control officers will react if they decide to open my luggage full of robots!
As for me it’s easier to present technical terms in English and the schools brand new TeachSurfing profile stated a need in English exchange, we agreed to do the workshop in English. Thanks to the engaged teachers of the school, the organization of the workshop went very smooth. The computer science teachers planed and setup the event. They stayed in touch with me via e-mail and clarified location, date, equipment, number and required knowledge of the participants of the event. I highly appreciated the support of the teachers before and during the workshop.
The event started with an open talk that introduced basics of a robotic system and described diverse robots built in universities and research institutes. I was amazed to see the biggest computer room of the school filled with students of different age being curious about robots and listening to an English language talk. For many participants English their third or fourth spoken language. This is due to the fact, that the region accommodates people from diverse ethnic like Romanian, Hungarian, German, Ukraine and some more.
The following session was made possible by my former research group at the Free University Berlin. The AI and Robotics research group lend me the necessary robots that enabled the great hands on experience for the students. Participants of this session were of the age seventeen or eighteen and have been selected by their teachers upon their advanced computer science skills. They were split up in five groups and each group received its own robot to experiment with. Starting with the necessary software installation part, the session moved quickly to discovering the hardware components. The most exciting part was definitely making the robots move. The students were surprisingly creative. One group presented a winding snake, the other shake hands with their arm robot, while others redesigned the robot to a mill or a writing hand with attached pencil.
It was inspiring to see the students and the teacher’s engagement with the topic. I experienced the enthusiasm and the excitement of people diving into a new area while I enjoying conversation about the schools projects, the life in Satu Mare and the topics they teach to the students. I am especially thankful to the organizers, for the delicious lunch and the great self-made cookies with lots of walnuts, marmalade and powder sugar. It was the perfect energizer during the day.