Alpha Lumen Technology Education Program

The program aims to combat digital illiteracy, evasion, and disinterest in the school by inspiring vocations and bringing opportunities for talented students in the field of Robotics and Programming. The project also focuses on a working culture of values and social skills bringing opportunities for young people and children, with high skills, but in situations of social vulnerability, to have access to Science and Technology.

As part of the technical education activities, we carried out the activities of the "ARC" (Alpha Robotics Competition) on the premises of The Matarazzo School, during the second semester of 2022. These activities lasting about 1.5 hours attracted the participation of a group of 25 students who had already participated in "Science Days" at the beginning of 2022. The limitation of participation in “ARC” was due to the use of the "kits" for the assembly of small robots powered by solar energy, and the "Wonder" - Dash model (https://home.makewonder.com/start/products).

Specifically, about the "Wonder", we clarify that these are small robots of control by external equipment (tablets, smartphone), which contains various sensors and that are programmable. They are items owned by the IAL and were used throughout the activities developed, but mainly in the final challenge of the "ARC". The challenge as the last activity of the meeting does not refer to a competition between the participants, it does not aim at the coronation of a winner with any prize, in fact, in this action, we seek to arouse interest in the theme from the proposition of opportunities for participants to exercise their creativity in the search for solutions.

The topics covered at this stage of the project took care to present practical, topics of great attention today:

1. Presentation of technologies focused on STEM.

2. Presentation of examples applied to the STEM area.

3. Assembly of a solar robotics kit with attention to the objectives of:

a. follow a roadmap for assembling components of a robotic system,

b. check and observe how the accuracy of the components and a well-done design can make a difference in a system,

c. organization of components and categorization,

d. teamwork and collaboration between teams.

4. Presentation of various robotic platforms and kits: such as "robotec", "Cue", "Wonder", Lego Mindstorm Ev3, and Prime/Inventor.

5. Deepening in separate modules of a robotic system: CPU, Batteries, Sensors, and Actuators (with presentation and work with some examples).

6. Presentation and a little hands-on on electronic platforms like Lego, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and others.

7. Be a user of the robot "Wonder" and make use of them via an Ipad, use 10 simultaneous robots to perform maneuvers (straight walking, zigzag, reverse mode, among others).

8. Shows systems and other areas of STEM that are not just robotics.

9. Small challenge of working collaboratively in teams with robots in a team challenge versus teams and individual robot versus individual robot to verify how important certain values are for individual work.

10. Discussion on interesting skills to know and develop, both "soft skills" (mental, physical, team, etc.) and "hard skills" (electronics, software, programming, etc.).

11. Ultimate challenge of a robot football.

At the end of this activity, we provide the certification of the participants in the “ARC” and a small ceremony of delivery of these certificates, which served not only to attest to the participation of interested parties but also to mark their presence and provoke other students to engage in the world of technology and robotics from the basic knowledge that will serve as an incentive for them to maintain studies in this area and for their future performance.