We enjoy it very much to be here, together with you and to have the opportunity to share our ideas. Both of us are teachers and my regular subjects at school are Sports and German. My colleague is music teacher and beside school he is conducting nonprofessional symphony orchestras. As you can see: There is no special background for coding robots! Our school is a so called Hauptschule, a secondary school, and this kind of school doesn’t really have a good reputation in Germany in general. In the opinion of some people this type of school is only for the “rest of pupils”, only for these, who are not able to join the gymnasium. We are here because we are standing on common ground - but is this really the case? You can see us now doing our duty in the classroom... (Folie 1) Seriously there are two ways of how “Education” can be considered. You can take two steps back and see, from a philanthropic point of view, the “pessimistic” purpose of education: Education prepares people to fit positions in society, it conditions people to a certain set of priority (attitudes, behaviors and so on) this is inevitable. Or in more plain words: there are some things that need to be done in school and after it. But we don’t want to achieve it like in this picture above: with command and control. Instead of chopping down all the edges it’s a question climate control - we should use a picture of gardening: In the some cases teachers are planting the seeds that grow forever - and the plats growing are divers. (Folie 2, Garten) So of course we want to educate towards new technologies, being the tools of tomorrow’s work spaces. But we as teachers should do it carefully while we create the circumstances under each and every child flourishes. In a minute we will explain how this can partly be achieved in our robotics course: We can do much more then just filling the slot. So let’s look at it from a gardening perspective: Education enriches life’s, it can free the mind. We see this educational field of learning and reflecting about algorithms and there utilization as a part of enlightenment. Computing and robotics can be utilized to be the grassroots for “learning” creativity. We are enthusiastic about the new possibilities robotics and coding offer for education in (not only) the STEM-disciplines. New technologies shouldn’t be like wizardry for the young generation. They need to have a basic understanding about programming to achieve digital sovereignty to be a responsible, free citizen. - If we want to be literate we need to know how to read and how to write. The future generation is born into reading new technology. Let’s start to teach how to write.
What will our world look like in 2070? That’s the time our students will retire. What skills will our new generation need to survive on this journey? If you ask this question the ones being in charge in our economy - and a national German institute did - theses potentials are among there answers: (Folie 3 / potentials) There are major indicators of being successful in the future - we call them potentials - they count for privat life and equally for work life and the skills needed in industry. Why is robotics relevant to leverage those potentials? No worries I know you are hungry - I will stress out just two of them but they stand pars per toto. First let’s have a look at problem solving: As you you know - you shure came across this - we as teachers think to have the “solution” and we present it to the kids - How many times did I as a pupil thought: “ ok ... but where is the problem?” Why do I need it? Now through computing I know that I need mathematics to solve problems... physics to build something and get it to work in the way I want ..., Second there is the personal potential of thinking creatively and working as a team. In robotics young people face new problems every lesson. Our pupils ask themselves and there partners the question: Which tool do I use and how can I use and code it? How can we approach as a team. Can different robots work together? They will notice that it is normal, even desirable, to make mistakes. They will learn that if you don't succeed with an idea at first - you can succeed later. Every bit of it can be a seed for future skills. We can assure you: will not meet this requisitions in a project week course for 20 students. You can imagine that this needs a whole new curriculum and we don’t have it in our regular schools. So what do we do? ————————— ————————— We created a course with 200 lessons over two years. Embedded in the weekly and mandatory extracurricular activity’s and held also on 8 Saturdays (8hours each). This graphic (Folie 5 - did. Struktur) shows our structure. The quarters are divided in the coding tools we find useful for our goals - they are put together in a structured way: We start with SCRATCH for three months: Scratch is an application which was developed in MIT, especially for young pupils. Only on their laptops pupils can build sceneries, games or fantasy situations, but they have to do it with typical robotic commands: with do-do not / with loops, with if and else and coordinate systems and so on. The commands and the language are very smart because they use graphical user interface and the pupils do it with drag and drop ...
The following three months they learn to code with Calliope. Calliope is a little micro controller similar to the microbot used in the UK for schools and this is the first step, pupils are coding a device out of the pc. The language is called NEPO and it was developed by Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. After theses three months with coding calliope they start with Lego Mindstorms. We continue to code with Fraunhofer’s NEPO-language because it’s a very well developed language with an incredible number of opportunities. To build robots with Lego is very attractive for pupils because they know how to build things with LEGO and for them it’s the first time they can build and code robots which can move. Lego Mindstorms with NEPO is so attractive and unlimited, that our pupils use it for the next 5 quarters. They do it besides coding YASKAWA robots. In the fourth quarter of our education we’ll start to introduce YASKAWA coding and we do it with a real industrial robot the YASKAWA Motoman GP 8. (Folie/Amelie) This robot comes with a teaching cell and safety systems which are necessary for save usage in schools with quite young pupils. To code YASKAWA robots the pupils need to learn a new coding language because all industrial robots have letters and figures based coding and this means a big step. (Folie 7, inform, letter based coding, no blocks) But with the experiences of three quarters coding with Scratch and NEPO the pupils are able to do it. And – beside – they are very proud to get in touch with the real world of robots and industry. During the second year of learning they combine the different robotic systems to find solutions for different problems. They can build production roads or assembly lines – like in the real industrial world. As we said at the beginning, for us it’s very important, to highlight the topic of chances and the risks of all aspects of digitalization and robotics for each individual and the society. The pupils have to read, to inform themselves, to discuss, to argue. We will need this skills we talked about in more professions than ever: Production processes are becoming more individual and have to be adapted more frequently. (Folie 8, verschiedene Roboter) For us, robots are more than a machine which executes algorithms - they are a tool for thinking and learning by touching and feeling instead of by talking. This understanding of new technologies in school and education helps us to counter the shortage of skilled workers and at the same time its vital for our children’s future. Thank you very much. 1400 words, ca. 12 minutes / 110 words per minute
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