Peerzada Abrar
The Economic Times (Bangalore edition)
Imagine your eight-year-old son having a robot as a playmate? He can use its robotic features to understand the science behind it and even customise it to adapt it to his own fancies. Not possible, you might think. But Bangalore-based Silicon Education World has come up with an innovative learning programme for school kids aged between 8-14 (std 5 to 9) which includes everything from building blocks to consumer electronics — hobby kits and robotics.
“Every child has innate engineering capabilities, which need to be discovered at an early age. This is a novel and innovative concept to motivate children towards robotics, electronics and creativity,” says Silicon Education World country manager Bhadran V Pillai.
He says these programmes are designed to trigger the effective use of scientific-creative brain management among kids and motivates them for a higher education and engineering career. “This is specially significant in the Indian context given the fact that children get the first taste of engineering concepts only after they complete school,” he says.
Robots here turn to be helping mates who chisel out a career in mechanical and electronic engineering for your child.
The ‘funology’ programme, divided into four levels of 48 hours each, comprises different task-based training, lab experiments, reallife examples and projects depending on the age of the student and the class they belong to. After the completion of each task-level, students are certified with coloured bands — yellow, blue, green and red —to show robotics, electronics, advanced robotics and advanced electronics. Tests, quiz, project-building, fun games and competition all form part of this programme.
Aiding them in the training process are LEGO kits which are used to teach the basic concepts of engineering design and modeling. And slowly they advance to making their own electronic gadgets, basic applications and specific computer programming.
A research conducted at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering says robot playmates may help treat children with autism by studying the interactions of such children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with robots. The research says that children with ASD interact more easily with mechanical devices than with humans.
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