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.