The future is being written all over the world in the most common, common language on the planet – the language of computers. Applications, technologies, devices, systems are created along and across the earth, changing the world. Education systems have long been called upon to prepare students at all levels for this brave new world of challenge and opportunity. OUR Computer frame, a company that constantly invests in education by promoting innovation, consistently works to realize its vision by integrating technology into education and emphasizing its contribution to progress. For this purpose, the second year the competition is held. Plesiobots Race 2.0 to promote robotics and its application in the context of entrepreneurship. The aim of the competition is for dozens of students to learn programming and create applications and devices with the theme “Robotics improves human life” in bidding for a trip to the CERN Research Center.

First… an idea

In 2020, Plaisio CEO Costas Gerardos came up with the idea to create a competitive robotics team from the children of the company’s partners. Command Plasiobots, which includes Irida Angelopoulou, Vassiliki Iliadis, Alkibiades Kotsikopoulos and Christos Rencis. Under the guidance of trainer and world champion in robotics, Diana Vuthiraku, they built a robotic cane for the visually impaired “Buddy the Cane”, which eventually earned them a gold medal at the International Robotics Olympiad, held in South Korea.

This great success was the reason for his organization the first open competition “Plaisiobots: The Race”. Hundreds of children had the opportunity to experience all stages of the idea, from its initial thinking and design to the creation and programming of the final robot prototype that can be put into production, thus for the first time connecting the concept of STEAM education with entrepreneurship. The three winning teams traveled to Boston to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they spent a week meeting university scientists, startup groups, and technology experts.

Repetition of educational material

Second competitionPlaisiobots Race 2.0was announced last October and was received with enthusiasm, attracting more than 600 entries from all over Greece. Its goal, as stated by Mr. Herardos, is “to expand the circle of children who speak the language of robotics as much as possible.” Of these, 329 students completed the first stage, which included online programming courses by Diana Vutirakou in C# and the Unity environment. The participating students learned about variables and how to declare them, the selection structure, the iteration structure, how to create an environment in Unity and the Update() and Start() functions, and how to create and move players in virtual game. At the end of the lessons, they were able to design and program their own game with one player moving around in 3D space. [MT3] Among the participants, Nicky admitted that through this contact with programming, “I found myself interested in it. I also liked the fact that I learned its basics well and now I can make a simple game on Unity”, and Nikolaos found the most interesting element of the course “that we were given the opportunity to transfer the acquired knowledge into practice, programming our own electronic game”.

At the second stage of the competition, which starts in February, the participants will be divided into groups of 3-4 children and will start studying in Educational centers in seventeen cities in Greece. (Serres, Drama, Xanthi, Alexandroupolis, Thessaloniki, Veria, Larisa, Volos, Ioannina, Agrinio, Patras, Athens, Kalamata, Chania, Kos, Rhodes, Heraklion). There they will also complete the construction of their own prototypes. The completed projects will be presented in a grand final before a jury that will select the winning team, which will win a trip to Europe’s largest nuclear energy and particle physics laboratory, CERNbut also in leading universities and companies in Switzerland.