Fascinating robots

What is a robot? How do you build one? How do you program it? During the Pestalozzi School Camps in the autumn of 2021, school children learned the answers to these questions under the guidance of scientists.

Moritz Geilinger, a postdoc in the Computational Robotics Lab, was invited to visit the two camps as a “star guest”. Star guests are researchers who tell the children about their own professional experience. “Having researchers visit the camps creates excitement,” Geilinger says. “I showed the kids that robotics isn't just for playing and learning inside the camp, but it's important in the real world, too.”

The researcher was delighted when the children showed him the robots they had built and programmed themselves. They also asked many questions about the robots Geilinger had brought along, including the Skaterbots developed by the Computational Robotics Lab. “Surprisingly, the kids’ questions were often very similar to the questions we ask ourselves in research,” he says. “They realised that their little robots weren’t that different from ‘real’ robots. That made them even more proud of their creations.”

From the get-go, the postdoc was enthusiastic about the request to participate in the two camps as a star guest. “I wanted to spark the same fascination in the children that I myself feel about robotics,” he says. “And I wanted to teach them that they can solve any problem with curiosity and perseverance.” He also learned from the experience. “When you present your research to the public, you have to generate enthusiasm and make complicated concepts easy to understand,” he explains. “These two skills are very valuable for researchers.”