July 27, 2024

As part of our robotics outreach program, we've begun a series of workshops to raise STEM awareness and education throughout India. Our fourth location was the Bala Mandir Trust's Satyamurthi School in Chennai, a city located far in the south of India. The Bala Mandir Trust is an organization dedicated to creating accessible education for students from any background, including offering schools for students living in slums, providing education and services for visually impaired girls, and even owning an orphanage to house less fortunate children in the area. We collaborated with them for this workshop.

For this stop, our focus was on younger students, with age ranges from 5th to 8th grade. The students were extremely smart and very excited to participate. Many of them spoke only Tamil, the primary language in the area, so we brought three local volunteers, a reputed civil engineer and professor, Dr. AR Santhakumar, and two of his PhD candidate students.

Communicating with the schools' dean, we were informed that while many of these students are bright and extremely capable, many come from significantly underprivileged backgrounds, with some being orphans and others living in slums.

Our workshop began with an introduction of robotics per usual. Unfortunately, some students were not able to understand the words in English, making our translators vital to the presentation. With them, we were able to engage the students and bring out their creative and curious side.

We spoke about the applications of robotics, coding, and entrepreneurial mindsets, and ran three experiments using Lego parts, including two brand new ones. Through the hands-on construction of gear systems, we taught gear trains, variations of speed and direction, bevel gears, end effectors, and the usage of gears and gearboxes in the real world.

At the end, we had students come up and present their new builds, including a demonstration by picking up premade obstacles using Lego grippers with a gearbox. To test their understanding, we had dozens of students come up and 'reteach' the concepts they had learned, which was fun for everyone.

We're extremely indebted to the volunteers at Bala Mandir and the teachers who came out to help setup and work with students we couldn't. In total, we hope that the approximately fifty students (pictured below) we taught go on to use the knowledge they learned, no matter in what setting.