I-SET Community projects

Techno Youth

I-SET has been requested by The South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA) to present workshops as part of their Techno Youth Program. These will be presented during the South African school holidays at the SAASTA campus.

SKA

Each year, the team at Square Kilometre Array (SKA) invite the I-SET project to be part of the National Science Week Program for the schools in the vicinity of the SKA.  In each of the schools the I-SET team presents a robotics workshop.  Photographs of these visits are available on the I-SET Facebook page.

Google CS4HS

Each year Google offers grants for and to support Computer Science for secondary school learners. 

Inspired towards Science, Engineering and Technology (I-SET), a Community Engagement flagship of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), was awarded a CH4HS Google grant that enabled the I-SET team to present this two-day programming workshop for secondary school learners in KZN, in close collaboration with the Bright Site Project in Durban. 

Through fun activities, learners were encouraged to build, programme and manipulate robots to perform many different tasks. The “Learning through doing” teaching paradigm exposed them to many useful programming concepts, for example the coding of the relationship between diameter and circumference, speed and distance.

The teams of learners built very basic robots and were required to programme them using the NXT-G software on the Unisa loan laptops that were transported from Pretoria.  Moving forward and backwards was soon mastered after which the robots had to be programmed to “write”.  By the end of the workshop, robots had been programmed to follow the line, move up and down an embankment, grab a stash of sweets, react to the ultra-sonic sensor and react to colour with sound.

Teams of educators, learners and SETSA students profitably demonstrated the value of pooling knowledge and experience.

Learners from Amaoti 3 High School said, “this was not what we expected. It was so much fun. We never knew that we would learn to build and programme robots. We didn’t have to do any writing, instead we got to do things and work as a team. We thought it would be too difficult and were surprised that we could complete the challenges even though we have never done this before”.

Learners from Zwelibanzi High School said,“when we were invited we never expected much or thought about what we were going to do. We thought we would be taught about stuff like processing gears and levers. Listening to the introduction we never thought that we would be able to build a robot. We learned how to make robots and even got them to do the things we programmed them to do. It was so exciting. We feel so proud of what we could do. It was a completely new experience”.

The SETSA students found the workshop to be a great way of relieving exam stress. They admitted that the tasks were rather challenging but they benefitted. “It was a great way to develop our problem solving skills”. In terms of their role as developing I-SET buddies they said, “it was good to mentor the learners. It gave us a chance to share knowledge – we got to show them what we have been learning”. One student shared: “Mostly it seemed as though we were giving them hope. They could discover through us that computer programming is fun and creative”.