Combining the excitement of competition with the rigors of science and technology, 13 library robo teams gathered at the end of November for an upbeat event focused on youth and robots, organized by Novateca in partnership with the National Children’s Library.
For two days, more than 100 teenagers and robo instructors competed on a level playing field, displaying their programming and teambuilding skills in the ‘City traffic’ and ‘Sumo’ Robo Missions and attracting crowds to clap and chant for their robots. Although each team arrived with robots built with the same components, participants designed, engineered and programmed them differently.
“This contest challenged us to improve our programming skills and come up with creative solutions to avoid city traffic,” mentioned Ceban Cătălina, participant from Rezina Robo team. In addition to the robot challenges, participants engaged in artistic performances and arranged their ‘pit areas’ with visual materials to give everyone a better sense of the library and the community they represent.
“We are happy to witness the excitement and the intensive collaboration between team members, who help each other to fix programming issues and raise their teams,” highlighted Claudia Balaban, Director of the National Children’s Library.
The competition was a great platform for the teams to exhibit STEM-based approaches, share their ideas and learn best practices from each other. With the help of their robotics instructors, boys and girls applied their programming skills and improved their critical thinking and problem-solving abilities by working with lego robots.
The awards ceremony felt like a celebration with a hopeful message delivered by IREX CEO and President, Kristin Lord: “Your generation can change the world by applying coding to real issues and addressing challenges through technical innovation.”
While the teams from Causeni, the National Children’s Library, and Rezina went home with the Library Robo League trophies, every participant and library demonstrated winning skills and altitudes.
The National Children’s Library will continue to coordinate and prepare the teams for other Robo League contests to be held in the future, and create opportunities for young learners to develop their IT and programming skills in a creative way!
To address the increasing demand in science and engineering education, Novateca supports Robotics Clubs at National Children’s Library and the public libraries from Ialoveni, Cricova, Galesti, Molovata Noua, Rascova, Falesti, Causeni, Rezina, Telenesti, Izbiste, Drujba and Voinova and equipped them with public access Robotics kits. Since the opening of the Robo Clubs in the fall of 2016, more than 500 children and youth have been trained in coding and programming robots at their public libraries.
To assess the impact of library robo clubs on children’s school performance and professional orientation, Novateca is currently conducting a survey and will inform about the results at the beginning of next year.