Surrounded by robots

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A couple of weekends ago we (Aberystwyth Robotics) held our annual “Beachlab” event. Usually, this is a hands-on event with robots and activities on the promenade. This year, we had to relocate to the campus because of COVID issues, and the robots were strictly hands-off for attendees. It was a bit like a pop-up robot museum, rather than an interactive display, but hey that’s better than nothing. This was the first outing for our new robotic submarine Afanc (which means “Beaver” in Welsh). Here I am talking about how the sub works: And here I am posing with the submarine whilst surrounded by other robotsRead More →

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In Aberystwyth Robotics Club we have a series of special events – pumpkin hack in late October, Christmas Card Circuits in December, Beach lab (robots on the prom) in June/July … These are outreach events designed to get people who don’t come to the regular weekly after-school clubs to have a go at building stuff. Some time back, due to workload and other stuff, I stepped back from the weekly after school club and now I concentrate on running these “specials”. As a new one this year, for Easter, we decided to do something egg-citing and run a robot egg race. This blog post summarisesRead More →

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In Aberystwyth Robotics Club we run after school robot-based activities for local schoolkids. This year we’ve just started a new term, and we decided to take in twice as many new starters as before. We decided it’d be a good idea to try being more open and let more kids have a go; it doesn’t matter if they haven’t been keen enough in the past to try out computing or robotics, what matters is they’re interested now and they want to give it a go. If they drop out at Christmas, that doesn’t matter, they’ve given it a shot. So we are running two parallelRead More →

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On Wednesday, Aber Robotics Club put on a day of coding, gaming and robotics in Old College. We ran two workshops: one on Minecraft, and one on Mindstorms (lego robots). Each had about 30 kids in, and the aim was to have a techy day that taught attendees something new, but that was also fun: it was a summer holiday workshop after all. In the Mindstorms lego robots workshop we did a mixture of activities – most of which I’ve blogged about before. We did the “program a humanoid robot” exercise, where we get kids to write down programs for their parents (who end upRead More →

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Last weekend was Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s main Hacker/maker camp. It’s an outstanding opportunity for meeting up with tinkerers, coders and makers from across the UK and beyond. I was at the first EMF (in 2012, blog post here) talking about women in tech, and went back to this one to talk about schools outreach and the work we’re doing with kids and families. I spoke about schools and kids engagement in general, but also more specifically about our EU playfulcoding project. You can see my talk here: And you can view the slides here, if you just want slides, not talk. The talk wasRead More →

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I’ve been helping out at Aber Robotics Club this year, which is a weekly after school club for local schoolkids. We got invited down to do a workshop in Pembrokeshire as part of “The Cheerful Project” who put on workshops in rural Pembrokeshire, so Steve filled his boot with Lego Mindstorms, got up early on a Saturday, met up with me and with Martin (our new institute schools outreach guy who doesn’t have a webpage yet) and we headed south to somewhere I’d never heard of. Whilst I’m not a huge fan of 7am starts on a Saturday, the weather was glorious and you can’tRead More →