"School out of the Box" is a project for students at the Ostfalia Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in which they work together to achieve results that are of practical use. As part of the project, students have now developed fun learning concepts for school classes 7 to 13. "All of our students have to complete at least one interdisciplinary project as part of their studies," explains Prof Dr Andreas Ligocki from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Ostfalia. "The aim here was to finalise a product as hardware that is designed not just for the drawer, but for other young people. Seeing your own functioning result at the end is a real motivation," says Ligocki. He is a professor of design fundamentals, machine elements and CAD as well as constructive hydraulics and mobile machines at the Wolfenbüttel campus and supervises courses and projects on the subject of "bots".
The term "bots" is short for "robots" and refers to small machines that are used to automatically perform desired tasks using appropriate computer programmes. They often imitate human behaviour very quickly and precisely.
In the "Bot" project "School out of the Box", students Anja Atanaskovski, Matti Sasse, Michelle Müller, Ole Pabst and Anna Milena Ebert developed offers for school visits and careers fairs in their fourth semester with the support of Professor Ligocki. The aim was and is to get different age groups interested in technology and scientific subjects. Following the successful completion of the project, a suitcase with a colourful selection of ideas and tasks is now ready for the six little "bots" named Jano, Lara, Mira, Nina, Otto and Timo. Adapted to the level of the respective learning group, they use them to master an obstacle course while driving autonomously, draw pictures or learn to dance, for example.
Ostfalia students also benefit from learning experiences "out of the box" or beyond technically orientated teaching content in this project. "Successful team communication was very important for us - both within the group and with Ostfalia specialists or people from the school sector," reports student Anja Atanaskovski. "We also had to put ourselves in the shoes of our target group, deal with time pressure and were able to apply in practice what we had learnt about project management in theory. This will be useful to us in future projects at Ostfalia and in our collaboration with partner companies." As the students confirm, the first test workshop with their "bots" at a school was a great success. Having found a good opportunity here to further develop their concept and ideas, the optimised "bots" are now waiting for a variety of new applications.
Offers from the Ostfalia Faculty of Mechanical Engineering for schools: https://www.ostfalia.de/hochschule/fakultaeten/fakultaet-maschinenbau/organisation/schulkontakte (external link, opens in a new window)
