3,000 municipal school students participate in country’s first
mid-level robotics competition
As India Inc strategises to increase the pool of quality engineers, two companies from Mumbai announced progress on an idea shared by their executives over lunch two years ago, at a press conference on Tuesday.
The brainwave was this: create future problem solvers and innovators by getting high-school students “excited about a career in science” to “create a large engineering pipeline”.
This was where their vision met that of a Manchester-based charity, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), that intends ‘to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated, and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders’. The two companies — NRB Bearings Ltd., and PTC, a software and services provider — are bringing FIRST Technology Challenge (FTC), a mid-level robotics competition, to India for the first time.
“This is a strategy to create engineers who can address the problems of tomorrow, some of which don’t even exist today. In a world well-versed with social media, the engineer has to face challenges that are virtual, not just geographical,” said John Stuart, senior vice-president, PTC Global Education.
Nine municipal schools from Aurangabad, Jalna and Thane have been chosen to participate in the first event, and plans are afoot to bring more schools under its fold every year.
For this year’s competition, 3,000 ninth standard students from the nine schools went through psychometric tests that sought to gauge their “creativity, motivation levels, ability to cope with failure, among other skills, followed by interviews”. Starting Tuesday, seven teams, each comprising ten participants, will begin preparation for the event on August 15.
“We have an all-girls’ team, and we eventually want to move their participation to 50%,” said Harshbeena Sahney Zaveri, president, NRB Bearings Ltd. With a standardised kit, the students are expected to design a robot that can throw balls of a certain dimension and weight into a net.
While FIRST will give them the free kit that has all it takes to make a robot, employees of NRB Bearings and PTC will mentor the teams. The winners will get life-long mentors and sponsorship for future education, Zaveri said.
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