TWI Education Outreach through BCS South Wales Lego Mindstorms Working Group

The AEMRI operation is always keen to work with and embrace schools, colleges and other educational institutions. We have previously hosted visits covering a range of ages, work placements and talks to the public. After all, we need to invest now in more technologists for the future.

In a recent successful collaboration with the British Computer Society (BCS) South Wales group, employee Ross Hanna (TWI Robotics Engineer) and PhD student Mengyuan Zhang (TWI AI researcher) spent a day at Marshfield Primary School, Cardiff supporting Paul Bulmer, BCS on a Lego Mindstorms STEM day activity.

The BCS activity supported a Robotics Lego Mindstorms workshop where two groups of year five classes (ages 9-10) were introduced to the world of robotics using Lego Mindstorms kits. First, real-world applications of robotics were introduced including a video on how robots can be used for inspecting aircraft wings (Intacom), to demonstrate the application of robots and NDT to ensure the aircraft are safe to fly in. Mengyuan and Ross introduced the concept of programming a robot, culminating in a virtual on-screen robot. In addition, several working Lego Mindstorms robots were demonstrated, ranging from a line follower to an automated tic-tac-toe game.