Elementary schools start the new school year with innovative robots
Six employees and two student employees from Maastricht University (UM) have used prize money to buy educational toys for 17 primary schools in Limburg. The toys - two programmable robots - teach children the basics of programming in a playful way.
In April 2018, UM organised a 24-hour App Challenge in which students and staff were challenged to invent and build a UM app. Two teams with employees from the Marketing and Communication department won second and third place and a nice amount of money.
During the App Challenge, the teams enjoyed creating and programming the app so much that the idea arose to spend the prize money on teaching materials for primary school students. The primary schools received packages containing:
- 'Doc': a talking, educative robot that playfully teaches children aged 4 to 7 basic programming skills
- 'Cyber Robot': a programmable robot for children from 8 years and up
3rd place winner App Challenge: team Welcome
- Team members: Rick Sollet, Pascal de Roos, Manon Gorissen, Mai Henckens
- App idea: the onboarding app helps new students and employees through their first 100 days at Maastricht University
- Find more details in the presentation of the Onboarding app
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