Pilot programme gives Malaysian students a chance to build their own robots

A robotic programme tailored to provide secondary school students basic designing, coding and sensor training in robotic development has been introduced recently Digi Telecommunications Sdn Bhd (Digi) together with Petrosains, The Discovery Centre (Petrosains) in Malaysia.

Open to students from schools surrounding the Pusat Internet 1Malaysia (PI1M) across the nation, the workshop is aimed at diversifying the role of the PI1M centres to be a creative learning platform for the communities.

Digi’s chief corporate affairs officer, Eugene Teh said: “Together with Petrosains we are able to come up with a basic robotic programme with a hands-on approach that we hope will engage the students and create interest to get involved in engineering, science and technology.

A pilot workshop was held end of last year at the PI1M in Semambu, Kuantan involving 18 Form Four students from three schools. The four-day workshop, which was divided into two sessions, saw the students designing, assembling and programming their own robots under the guidance of trainers who are experts in the robotic field.

“Through the pilot workshop, we have seen how these students with almost no experience or background in robotics successfully tackled a project that requires a multi-skill approach. Not only do they need to be involved in many technical related decision making but they also have to learn how to work as a team, to think critically as well as to manage their problem solving skills.

“We believe this programme will help to instill engineering skills, computer programming, innovation and creativity among these students, just like the way we envision the role of PI1M as a centre for knowledge learning,” Teh added.

Under this collaboration, Digi will be providing the training facilities in terms of space and workstations at the PI1M centres, while Petrosains will be contributing the robotics training programme, modules as well as trainers.