“Our kids can beat a university graduate any day at building a robot,” claims Shams Jaber, as he moves among children and robots.
Shams and his team, an eccentric mix of six engineering and business undergraduates in their final year at BRAC University, have been holding robotics classes for the past three months. They teach children how to build robots and familiarise them with complex concepts of wiring and circuitry.
Every Saturday, an empty room in one of the many high-rises in the urban maze of Niketon is filled with the hustle and bustle of seven eager children rummaging through boxes of wires and half-made robots.
I arrived at their door, sceptical of what lay on the other side.
I expected an ordinary classroom, with the typical austere white-washed walls and wooden benches. Instead, I found a room with colourful walls with graffiti of Gandhi and Galileo. Equipment was strewn across the tables – evidence of impatient little artists at work.
The kids kept teachers Shams Jaber and Maisun Ibn Monowar busy from the moment they came in, demanding new projects to work on, or searching for their half-made robots.
These students spend weekdays in educational environments, governed by rules, and under constant supervision. Then they come to this class, where the only rule is: “Let your imagination flow.”
The school started out with 15 children, but only seven remain – all of whom show a strong passion for robotics. They undertake a variety of projects, like building and programming a pathfinding robot.
“Usually children are reluctant to do their homework or pay attention in class, but our students surprise us with their enthusiasm to learn. Nine-year-old Abrar cries when his father doesn’t allow him to take his projects and electronic kits home,” Shams says.
A confident and serious twelve-year-old named Fahim walks into class and instantly picks up bits of wire and batteries, pouring all of his concentration into his muse for the day: the circuit board. Asked why he chose to come here, he shrugs and says: “I just like doing this class.”
He finds nothing unusual about building a robot from scratch at such a young age.
Maisun Ibn Monowar and Probal Barman, engineering students at BRAC, are the helping hands behind the success of these kids, making lessons easier for them to learn, and simplifying the more intricate details of programming and circuit development.
Maisun says: “In any other school or class you would depend on books and theories to get you through the course, but with robotics you can’t go far without practical classes. Instead of teaching them complex methods through theories, we just show them how to do it. The kids basically play around with wiring and breadboards. We just show them the how-to-play.”
“It’s not easy. At more complex levels, we need the kids to sit down and listen to theories and explanations, while they seldom want to move away from their worktables. In such situations, you have to sit and figure out how to keep the kids interested while teaching them the critical concepts. Working that out is both exhilarating and exhausting. But it is worth the hard work,” says Maisun.
Shams says WNES was started with the intention of creating an education system that thrives on imagination, and does not reduce itself to standardised learning. The classes for robotics are meant to be the stepping stones to their larger, innovative enterprise.
“We plan to expand into a full-fledged engineering school, offering a wide range of subjects with the flexible and interactive approach to teaching that is missing in today’s education system. For our new batch of students this February, we are offering game development and electronics along with robotics. Our present batch has already started working on building a cell phone,” says Shams.
WNES’s current batch of seven kids have enrolled as participants in BRAC University Robotics Club’s competition, Path Finder Robot Contest 3, an inter-university competition where teams compete against one another to create the best line-follower robot. Participating with experienced university graduates shows the level of expertise the kids have achieved at such a young age.
“When I look back to my school days, studies were not a good memory. I find the traditional system of memorising and following the book to be suffocating. I wanted to change that. So last February, I decided to do something about it. The robotics classes are the first of many such programmes to come.”