Vinay – My ‘Build a Bot’ Internship

July 23, 2012 / by admin / 1 Comment / Filed under Lego Robotics

My internship at Beyond Education began in early June 2012 and after six weeks that passed far too quickly, my time in South Africa is at an end. During my stay, my main task was to help learners in the Cape Town area to better understand science and technology. I had the privilege of working with a number of Cape Town schools and organizations during my stay, the first of which was Bloubergrant High School. At Bloubergrant, I worked with matriculate students in the natural science class by reviewing their physics and chemistry exams with them. It was wonderful to work with such eager and respectful students.

Following my time at Bloubergrant, I ran a week-long robotics program with a group of six learners at Inkwenkwezi Secondary School. The students learned about engineering and computer programming all while building a series of increasingly complicated and ornate robots (details of this project can be found here).

After Inkwenkwezi, I spend some time assisting with a winter Lego robotics workshop sponsored by ORT TECH, which prepared two teams of middle school students to enter the Robot Olympiad competition. In addition to interacting with the young engineers, I observed the way they went about constructing and tuning their designs and gained insight into what types of projects and challenges would be appropriate for a robotics interest party with children in the same age group.

During my final week in South Africa, I visited the TRAC lab at Stellenbosch University where top students from a number of Cape Town high schools were participating in an intensive, week-long science lab program. In addition to interacting with the students on a personal level, I was able to help them in their construction and understanding of AC and DC circuits.

Although my time in Cape Town has been brief, the experiences I’ve had have been richly informative and invigorating. It has been an absolute pleasure to work for Beyond Education and I wish them nothing but great success in all their future projects and endeavors.