The Airbus Little Engineer Program - Teaching School Children the importance of science and helping them program robots!

thebatmanbiker (62)in #volunteering • 6 years ago

I've been interested in volunteering and helping out NGOs for quite some time now. I think the interest in social service and volunteering started in my engineering days when I used to help out with organizing local blood donation camps with my dad. So, during my studies and now, during my work, I have always look at opportunities to do something that would give back to society, in any little way possible.

During my time at Airbus Group, I've looked at possible ways to be part of volunteering causes. One of the causes that I volunteer for is the Little Engineer program that Airbus conducts across the world.

What is the Little Engineer Program?

The Little Engineer is dedicated to educating young minds and increasing public understanding and appreciation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics through interactive tailored programs. It is designed to enlighten and empower youth in areas of science and technology. The main focus of the program are in robotics, renewable energy and environmental related sciences.

Why the Little Engineer Program?

The little engineer program is a specially designed program that aims to instill an appreciation for science and technology (AKA STEM). With dropping enrollment levels in basic sciences and engineering across the world (especially among girls), the Little Engineer program is designed to make boys and girls interested in science and engineering from a very young age, as talent and interest is a key contributor to the future of engineering and aviation.

The Airbus India Little Engineer program was organized at Christel House School that is near Yelahanka air force station. I was the first volunteer to be there along with Anoop, another friend of mine from work. The school was already busy. Students were moving about, teachers going to classes. We waited till the rest of the group showed up before we were ready to start.

Christel House's mission is to "provide education to needy and poor students to uplift them out of poverty and make them self sufficient in the future". It is a very nice place and it felt as a holistic educational academy to me.

We had breakfast at the canteen in the school. The walls of the canteen were full of paintings which looked like they had been done by the students themselves.

After breakfast, we were taken to the computer lab where the program was to happen. The kits that were provided by the Airbus Foundation were laid on the tables. There were about 35 students in all. Each group had 4-5 students and one mentor. My mentoring group consisted of 4 girls. We were also helped by the teachers of the foundation.

The program was started with an introduction about Airbus and the world's largest aircraft - the Airbus A380. The learning was built around the A380. Since the A380's parts are designed and built in many parts of Europe, the first programming exercise was to build and program a robot that would go to each of the places of assembly and collect parts to get them to Toulouse in France where the final assembly would occur.

Flowcharts were used to understand the concepts of programming and the steps needed to program the robot to move between different points on the map, turn and so on. The students soon got busy with assembling the robot from the parts that were provided in the kit.

Once I was able to explain to them the logic that was required to make the robot move along the different parts on the map, the girls were pretty smart to program the whole robot themselves. The whole classroom was excited to trial their program and robot on the map that we had laid out.

And of course, some of the robots ran wild...

After a few trial and errors, we managed to get the robot going well. Now it was on to the next part of the program.

For the second part, the objective was to guide an aircraft from the terminal to the parking gate. This was done with the concept of a line following robot. On top of the robot, a foam model of the A380 was mounted.

The concept of programming remained as before, but there were new things to learn such as line following, sensors and how they detect lines via different colors and calibration. Once that was done, the girls got busy building the robot and placing the aircraft on top of the robot. Programming took a few trials as always.

Once they completed the programming and assembling the robot, it was time to test it out. It took a few trial and error steps to make the turns correctly But once we got through that part, the line following robot worked perfectly.

That was the end of the program, and the results were evident from the gleaming faces of the students. Some of them enthusiastically replied that they were interested in science and technology. One of the girls even said that she wanted to be a computer science engineer because that was her mother's dream and she wanted to make her proud. It was so nice to hear such things and see the determination in their faces. Hopefully, they will all go on and become self sufficient, and live a good life in the future.

We took some group photos to close off the day...

And it was time for some selfies with the students and volunteers!

And with that, the day came to an end. We left Christel House quite satisfied, and hope to go back their soon!

If you like my work, please upvote, comment and resteem/share with your friends. You may also like some of my other work, which you can check from the links below.

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