KIDS IN CONTROL: A control-centered workshop for promoting STEM skills and inclusion for kids from 8 to 10 years old

Organiser

Alessandra Parisio (University of Manchester, UK)

Sponsoring IFAC body

IFAC Technical Committee 9.2 - Systems and Control for Societal Impact

Link

Overview

We propose to develop an on-site workshop, whose goal is to help kids of
8-10 years achieving intellectual independence and self efficacy towards technology. More
precisely, we envision a 3-hours experience, in which the participants:

are made familiar with intuitively understandable applications of automatic control in
various fields of life (including automotive, sport & fitness, home automation,
robotics);
are made familiar with intuitively understandable ideas of control strategies (sensor,
actuators, feedback, dynamic evolution);
use https://scratch.mit.edu/, a visual coding platform, to subconsciously learn in a
playful way how to create programs, and in this way increase their self efficacy
towards using computer languages to describe reality;
use https://www.microbit.org/, a low cost educational board that can be programmed
through https://scratch.mit.edu/, as hardware-in-the-loop, to subconsciously learn the
potential of electronics, and in this way increase their self efficacy towards managing
hardware.