By Alesha Capone
Robots rock – just ask students from six schools in the west who have been participating in a coding program.
The four-week Robots at Home Coding Challenge is being delivered by Wyndham Tech School, which is based at Victoria University’s Werribee campus.
The tech school offers students and teachers in the west access to free programs about STEM skills and the increasing presence of automation, robotics and digitisation in the workplace.
The Coding Challenge is the brainchild of Gail Bray, the newly-appointed Wyndham Tech School director and Victoria University Polytechnic’s general manager of learning and innovation.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning are skills required for the future of work, and young people in the west of Melbourne now have access to leading-edge training facilities,” Ms Bray said.
“With COVID-19, students have been unable to visit the Wyndham Tech School, so with our partner schools, we thought we would take the robots to them.”
Thomas Carr College in Tarneit became the first of the six schools to participate in the coding program, hand-delivering 25 small robots to the homes of year 7 students during recent weeks as part of their digital technology curriculum.
Educational resources company The Brainary, which is based in Geelong West, provided the robots and weekly online sessions for the students.
The students learn to program a robot for a scenario in which it would meet people arriving at the Royal Children’s Hospital.
Students study camera control, sound, speech recognition and more in order to code the robots to recognise when a person is approaching them and provide directions to a location in the hospital.
Thomas Carr principal Craig Holmes said the coding challenge had been a great way to bridge the period between when students were learning at home due to the pandemic and when they returned to school this week.
Other schools participating in the challenge are Bayside P-12 College, Featherbrook P-9 College, The Grange P-12 College and Good News Lutheran College.
