Teenagers, young people and university students from disadvantaged communities will learn how to build cost-effective robots at the AfrikaBot challenge, which takes place on Saturday.
AfrikaBot is an initiative of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in partnership with the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers. It aims to expose young people to engineering concepts and inspire them to try their hand at robot construction and programming.
AfrikaBot encourages young people to learn about ways in which ordinary household items can be recycled into useful electronics and control systems. Young people can use shoe polish tins, peanut butter jar lids and rubber bands to construct some desktop robots.
Participation in AfrikaBot is the perfect way to learn more about what engineers do, and encourage teenagers to start thinking about how they can solve common everyday problems, says Michael Ettershank, manager of the RobotScience project at the UJ TechnoLab.
"A clever robot does not have to be that expensive," he says.
"To make robotics training and AfrikaBot accessible, the P1X8 robot is made partly from junk you may have lying around, while you build the electronics yourself from parts you can order online. You can choose to program the controller microchip with free text or graphical software available on the Internet."
According to Ettershank, TechnoLab will work with young people from January, showing them how to build robots.
The official AfrikaBot robotics competition will be in October 2016.
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