IDA and poly start robotics initiative

21 Jul 2014

The Straits Times, 19 July 2014 - At the National Engineers Day (NED) event, Education Minister Heng Sweet Keat announced a $2.8 million collaboration between SP and IDA to teach young children the nuts and bolts of programming robots. The initiative, called the Robotics and Maker Academy (RMA), will target a total of 30 primary and secondary schools and benefit about 10,000 students over three years. Under the RMA programme, poly lecturers will teach students and teachers to write codes for robots. For a start, they will learn to program virtual robots on the CoSpace software platform developed by SP. As part of a basic learning package, students may be taught to get these on-screen robots to complete simple tasks, such as picking up treasures while avoiding booby traps in a game setting. Dr Ng Buck Sin, an SP engineering lecturer, opined on how RMA will excite youths in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  As part of the NED event,  three awards to poly students who came up with innovative health-care technologies were also given out. The top award went to students from TP. Similar story was reported in Lianhe Zaobao, The Business Times and on Capital95.8FM, 938Live and ChannelNews Asia.com.