(Finance) – The ENEA Casaccia Research Center (Rome) hosted the “Rob.In Cup”a robotics competition, organized within the Rob.in project to combat child educational poverty, which saw ENEA collaborate with the ESCOOP social cooperative (coordinator) and the isocial enterprise “With the Children”. The activities proposed in the three years of the project involved middle and high schools with a particular focus on robotics and artificial intelligence, programming languages and Python code, microcontrollers, prototyping and development platforms. The event – ENEA reports in a note – also involved some of the kids who participated in the workshops held in Puglia, in Taranto, San Giovanni Rotondo and Cerignola, in neighborhoods where high rates of abandonment and school dropout are combined with crime and youth unemployment.
“This team competition offered a dynamic and stimulating context that increased the interest and motivation of the kids,” explains Andrea Zanela, researcher at the ENEA Energy and Data Science Laboratory and project manager –. The competitions took place in an environment where students learned to solve problems by collaborating while respecting each other’s abilities and roles, with great enthusiasm and participation”.
THE 25 participants in the final Roman competition are those who won the regional competitions that took place in May and June 2024.
As first try the teams, equipped with robots that they learned to manage both in hardware and software during the project, faced an obstacle course to overcome in the shortest possible time with the least number of penalties. second test saw them engaged in a game between robots where the goal was to eliminate the greatest number of opponents. At the end of the competitions, the boys of each laboratory illustrated their study path highlighting the results achieved.
The Rob.in project saw the overall involvement of over a thousand students who, together with teachers and educators, were followed by ENEA researchers along a path of knowledge of the opportunities offered by teaching supported by digital technologies that can contribute to raising study levels, promoting interpersonal interactions, team spirit, cooperative learning and the development of creativity.
“The goal was to develop life experiences that would highlight the talents and personalities of the kids, highlighting their human and relational skills in an expanded school context, not limited to curricular activities and the evaluation of acquired skills. And for the record, the cup up for grabs was won by the San Giovanni Rotondo laboratory”, he concludes Zanela.