Description
Roland Gesthuizen https://2016.pycon-au.org/schedule/203/view_talk Schools face a daunting challenge to increase their student exposure to coding, hands-on technology learning to solve some real-world problems and teaching STEM principles (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) through design, construction and testing. This personal presentation by a leading teacher illustrate journey to connect his students to some real-world problems and the challenges faced along the way. Following on from an earlier computational-thinking challenge to build and program a moving vehicle, Roland's current mission is to challenge students to design, build a smart city consisting of intelligent vehicles and infrastructure. To do this they need to program a navigation algorithm to autonomously navigate vehicles through a series of traffic challenges that test collision avoidance and road safety. They have been invited to showcase their work at the ITS2016 Word Congress in Melbourne with a maker-space for delegates to share our hands-on problem solving and learning with the software and models developed by the students. Moonshots live in a grey area between audacious technology and pure science fiction. Our moonshot was to empower students around the globe to build and control their future.