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It is 4 PM EAT and as the automated bell rings you can see the ecstasy on the teenage boys’ faces as they make their way into the computer lab at Mang’u High School. Within minutes, the chatter from the forty robotics club students dies down and is replaced with keen interest as their tutors, who happen to be their age mates, begin the class.
The whole last week of July, five students from Horace Mann School in New York were teaching robotics to the tech-savvy students in the newly-founded robotics club at the Kenyan high school- Mang’u High. Ellen Wang, Menya Obia, Ren Kirchmann, Imran Siddiqui, and Mich Obia disclosed that it was their love for robotics that saw them travel across the world to share their knowledge and learn from their peers.
Samuel Serem, the computer teacher and patron of the robotics club nurses the hope that after the week-long training, the Kenyan students may thrive in their projects and even compete internationally in the FRC. According to Serem, the program is the first of many to come. “We are doing a program that has never been done, so getting students from New York to come to train robotics is a big achievement,” he said.
Serem explained that it was easy to have a one-week program since the students at Mang’u already had foundational knowledge of robotics. “The only challenge that we had was the materials. So we thank the students from New York, they came with their materials, which they will leave with us,” he said.
He further confirmed that the program is the beginning of future collaborations that will help the students work with each other in creating revolutionary robots that will solve problems in different fields such as industries, factories, and even in agricultural spheres.
Speaking during an interview, Ellen Wang, who is in her tenth grade at Horace Mann School, explained her devotion to sharing her passion with her peers. “I play a lot of chess. That was how I first got connected to Kenya. I’ve been teaching chess to some Kenyan students online since 2016,” she said.
“I first came to Kenya in March of 2023, just for a week or so to teach Kenyan students, and then I wanted to do a similar thing with robotics,” she offered.
Wang recounts that she started sharing ideas with Menya Obia, a teammate of hers who is originally from Kenya. They figured that their mutual connection to Kenya would be a solid ground for their robotics project.
“We got in contact with Isaac Nyangolo, the founder of Zeraki edtech, who was super helpful. And we’re grateful for what he’s done for us. He connected us to Mang’u High School,” Wang recounted.
According to Wang, the program was beneficial to both their five-member team and the Mang’u high school students. “I was super duper impressed with their designs, like a lot of the ideas that they came up with we had never thought of before. So they were teaching us a lot,” she confessed.
Imran Siddiqui, who is in his eleventh grade at Horace Mann tutored the robotic students that were more inclined towards designing and building. “We were teaching the kids sort of like making sure that they could use the tools safely before we started assembling like the bigger robot. It was just great seeing how everyone was so engaging.” Siddiqui attested that the program was more fulfilling than he anticipated owing to the student’s reception and enthusiasm.
Childhood Passions
Describing their relationships with robotics, most of the students attested that their interests grew from their juvenile years.
Wang revealed that her love for STEM budded from a very young age. As a child whose parents were in the STEM fields, she got exposed to robotics early in her childhood. A factor that highly triggered her love for math, coding, and physics.
“I started doing robotics when I was in elementary school, and I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since then. I’m mostly focused on the coding and the electronics part of the robot. And it’s been a great part of my life,” said Wang.
Wang explained that when she first started coding, she met a group of friends who aligned with her love for robotics, making it more fun to create robots from scratch. She was also part of the team that represented her school at the FIRST Robotics Competition in 2022. During the World Robotics Championships, her team built a robot that could shoot hoops and climb monkey bars. She says that the competitions leading up to the championships nurtured her passion even more.
According to Menya Obia, the Head of Build and Design, robotics is not just a hobby. It is more of a sport that requires discipline and commitment. “We have practice days, game days. We have a team that collaborates and has projects together.”
Obia explained that he always desires to connect with his peers and share their experiences and inspire them in their engineering and robotics dreams. Back at school, he and his team try their best to entice younger students into joining the club and learning robotics.
“We spend hours in school doing this, and since Kenya is my homeland, I was drawn to the country,” he said.
On their hopes and plans, Obia disclosed that they intend to work with less privileged schools in Kenya to advance robotics in areas where their agemates know nothing about robotics. While this is the first time to have collaborated with other schools on this project, he believes it is a stepping stone for future projects globally.
Obia, who hopes to someday become a mechanical engineer, regards robotics as a solution to many of the world’s modern problems. He believes, for instance, that climate change is a really big deal and hopes that in the future, the world can use robotics to combat it.
Ren Kirchmann is the Head of Operations at the Basement Lions. She works with Wang to teach the electronics component of robotics, although she sometimes dabbles with coding. According to Kirchmann, her experience in Kenya has been quite meaningful. She attests that interacting with the students has been an incredible experience and seeing their zeal in robotics was awe-inspiring.
The eleventh-grade student reiterates that robotics offers a myriad of applications across different fields. “It’s just incredible technology that can allow for so much more to happen. It can help with medical applications, it can help with transportation, it can help with agriculture, the possibilities are endless with robotics,” she explained.
In Tune With Modern World
Apart from being classmates and best friends, Allen Kilonzo and John Mark take pride in being the heads and founders of the Robotics Club at Mang’u High School. The tenth-grade students spoke of how their desire to learn robotics led to the birth of the club, and subsequently the collaboration with Horace Mann students. They are positive that the club will grow and with the guidance of their newly-found friends and mentors, they will enhance their skills and grow to the point of competing internationally.
Lawrence Mungai, the Deputy Principal at Mang’u High School beams with pride every time he talks about the newest club in his school. He revealed that the robotics club is rapidly growing despite being the most recently formed club in the school. He recounted how it first began with the students toying around with a drone that the computer teacher had purchased for the club.
“There were a few students who had this interest in coding. So they would meet every Thursday between one and two. But slowly, they saw the need to have a club that was more in tune with the times,” he said.
Mungai believes that the collaboration between Mang’u and Horace Mann students is timely since it will enable the students to nurture their talent even before they head out to universities. The program, he went on to say, will also help improve the student’s problem-solving skills.
“It’s not just an issue of coming up with a robot, it starts from the design itself. I’ve seen a lot of them toying around with welding and so on. And the actual coding programming part of it.”
When questioned about the sustainability of the program, Mungai expressed his optimism saying, “I would think that there will be a way in which we can also source for locally available materials. We’ve seen other people coming up with their robots using locally sourced materials. We are very hopeful that we are going to sustain it by using the materials that are there.”
Wang attested that a lot of the students showed a deep-seated zeal to learn robotics and shared her anticipation to maintain the learning relationship with her peers at Mang’u High School.
“We hope that we can continue having lessons or just talking online. So we plan to meet like once a week or so and just meet with the students to discuss their ideas and hopefully using the skills that we’ve taught them, they can add more things to their robot and they can sort of see it comes to life in terms of funding. That is the biggest obstacle both for us and for Mang’u.”
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