Creative Cape Town

It’s spring. The Jutzens* have a new vacuum cleaner. Or, they had. Now it’s sitting in pieces on the lounge floor alongside a beaming, nine-year-old Benji. He single-handedly took it apart “so’s I can build it back together”. Ordinary parents would naturally be upset. What do clever parents do with children like this? THEY ENCOURAGE THEM. Enter Open Innovation Studio’s Robotics course for children.

For some, the idea of a mechanical engineering course for youngsters sounds more like rocket science than reality, but at Open Innovation Studio, the Robotics course aimed at kids is proving that designing and building hardware and software is actually child’s play. 

Every Saturday, youngsters from 6 – 18 years spend the morning connecting wires, chips, buttons and bits and programming them digitally to perform the operations that make our sound systems, car alarms, computers and hair-dryers work.

The cumulative, continual course has been running for three years and now takes place at the Open Innovation Studio premises in Buitenkant Street in the East City Precinct.

 “Robotics is the integrator for mechanics, electronics, computer programming and design. We’re interested in people with ideas that will change the world.” says course tutor and co-starter of Open Innovation Studios, Neels van der Westhuizen.  So why children? The motivation for the course is threefold. If our youngsters started sooner, South Africa could contribute competitively to the design of products and technologies.  A basic grounding in electronic, mechanical and digital design skills acquired during school years widens employment opportunities.  Science and technology is not exactly exciting to a small someone thinking of exploring the trade. Playtime to the rescue – so long, Lego; hello RoboPro.

Through observation, the course facilitators have discovered that children love writing games and building robots.   In addition, if a child can see their process or a product in the real world, they take to it more quickly, so they start children off with simple, physical blocks to be built into a sequence to develop their visual programming language. “Some of the little guys start programming even before they’ve finished mastering the English language. They can put together diagrams and flows much more easily than conjugating a verb.”

This space for bright young mind to do brilliant things with buttons, motherboards and brainpower also offers quality family time. “You can’t exclude the social dynamics,” Neels points out. “If, for the parents, it’s a place to drop their kids off for the morning, it won’t work. The more intensely the parents are involved the more effective it is.”

Integration extends beyond the Robotics course, and adults aren’t left out.  Host to various academic, research and development professionals and bodies, Open Innovation Studio fosters socially relevant innovation through its commitment to “advance the development of new models, technologies and services”.  Its resident innovators operate independently and benefit from shared expertise, expenses and expression.  ‘The hacker space’, is an informal space, a community of adult individuals contributing to knowledge and resource exchange.  You don’t have to be into electronics or mechanics, either. The Studio has initiated Brightest Young Minds – an incubator for social entrepreneurship between promising academic students and supportive corporate companies.

But back to the building blocks, the organisation’s motto “work, learn, share; change the world”, is echoed in the structure and evolution of the Robotics course, which is flexible and process-based.  Working in groups or on their own, the youngsters direct the flow and sequence of course components under careful guidance from adult professionals who like to play with toys. 

I’m sitting with one of the youngest students. He’s eight, and he’s wired up his bedroom, he tells me, so that an alarm is triggered every time someone walks in. Only he has the deactivation code. Then he frowns and fiddles with the circuit board he’s built this morning. “Is it maybe the bulb or the wiring?” I ask.  “No, we checked that. It’s the programme.”

“Maybe once you’ve found that glitch, you’ll design a kitchen that cleans itself?” I suggest to him as we and the dads leave reluctantly, “I’m hopeless at programming my housemates.”

“One that makes its own ice cream” he adds with a naughty look.  And you know what? With incentive like that, he probably will, too.

*Not their real names

For more information, call Neels van der Westhuizen

Tel. 082 334 3259

Open Innovation Studio

2^nd Floor

27 Buitenkant Street

Cape Town