This past March 2024 I had the wonderful opportunity to teach a three-week-long robotics club in the wonderful town of Csíkszereda (in Romanian ‘Miercurea Ciuc’) in the majority ethnic Hungarian region of Transylvania (called the Székelyföld in Hungarian, meaning ‘land of the Székelys’), following TEFL (English as a foreign language) volunteer work there in the fall prior. I worked in the fall with the NGO organization Care2Travel based in Csíkszereda, and in the spring I greatly benefitted from their assistance and connections to the community.
In this post I describe the curriculum (as well as have it linked for download) I used, as well as my setup.
As the town is in an ethnic Hungarian region, the most common (and often only) spoken language is Hungarian. While children from elementary school to high school have English classes as well as Romanian (the national language) classes, the mastery of these is not very high and thus posed a linguistic barrier, overcome in part by translations of the slide decks into Hungarian and explanations in both Hungarian and English. The slide decks can be downloaded at the bottom of the page in English and Hungarian.
Regarding a teaching space, I was kindly allowed to borrow a classroom at the Waldorf School on Petőfi Sándor street, in the town center. In that classroom, I had use of a desk projector, a few desks and many chairs for students, and some electric plugs.
As I could not bring a FLL table from the US to Romania, I had to construct one here, using metric-cut materials. Thus, it was not exactly like the American models but quite similar, using a pine wood panel as the base from the company Ambient Decor based in Buzău, România. Attached here is my 3D model of how I built the table.
As other materials, I brought four of my RoboMentors ‘littlebots‘ as well as two City Shaper field sets.
Having hung up flyers in the town a few weeks prior, I had a total of 22 children attend the club, signed up by their parents who contacted me, split into two sections that met a total of 5 times (twice a week except for the first one). The last meeting was a sort of competition between the sections, with two tables and four robots as in an FLL Alliance match, as a fun test of knowledge, also due to Good Friday resulting in a school holiday on the last scheduled club meeting for Section 2.
After a short introduction (PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote), we began to talk about basic robotics, EV3, and programming concepts as well as moving forward and controlling the arm in our first lesson (PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote). The second (PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote) and third (PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote) lessons were split into a few sessions each as to not rush; they were about the Color and Gyro Sensors respectively, uses for stopping either at a black line or an angle, and following a line or directional heading.
At the beginning of each session except for the first was a building activity – given pieces and a page with a few photos of a mechanism, the task for each group of 3-4 children was to build the specified mechanism. Here you can find the PDF of all of the building tasks, with text in English and Hungarian.
On the last club day, we held our mini competition, with modified missions (English, Hungarian) so that the littlebots would not need to be modified physically. The teams performed well, each scoring around 30 points per robot (not counting the 60 precision points present unless taken away), which gives a total of 120±20 points per alliance, not bad for one hour and a half of programming !
I look forward to returning in the summer to hold another club like this, and to help continuing to develop the interest in FLL robotics in Csíkszereda.
© The RoboMentors, Marc D. Nichitiu
The educational materials here may be used in any way as long as they are not behind a paywall. Please cite the RoboMentors when you use these in a class or for some other purpose 🙂
Downloads:
Introduction:
• EN: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
• HU: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
Lesson 1:
• EN: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
• HU: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
Lesson 2:
• EN: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
• HU: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
Lesson 3:
• EN: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
• HU: PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote
Building tasks: EN/HU PDF
Modified City Shaper Missions: English PDF, Hungarian PDF