Robotics for Kids: Devcon Kids x Mano Amiga

February 14, 2019

The Mano Amiga students got to be engineers for a day as they spent an entire Saturday building their own robots.  Facilitators from DevCon Philippines taught the students how to use the Makeblock MBot, an educational robot which helps teach kids the fundamentals of coding and engineering. The day-long robotics workshop is part of a series of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics(STEM)-focused programs under the DevCon kids club which piloted in Mano Amiga at the start of the school year.

Students experienced every stage of producing a working robot; they assembled the MBot from the kit, learned how to code its movements, and disassembled the MBot to be returned to the kit.

Working with code of any form can be challenging, but the students did not let the perceived difficulty stop them from trying to work with the robot as best as they could. Through a process of trial and error, students found out the finer details related to coding, such as which numbers to input so the robot would move at a certain speed or flash a certain color of light. The students proudly exhibited what their robots could do through a Robot-sumo, a sport in which two robots compete and strive to push the other out of a circle.  At the end of the session, the robot jointly developed by Lovely Villar and Sydney Torrena emerged as the winner for outperforming the other robots during the battle- a victory shared by the entire club.