So anyone who knows me, knows I cannot abide letting my mind, nor my hands sit idle, which often leaves me in a bit of a difficult situation given my health predicaments. I’ve been vocal on here previously, about the stress that being very long term ill causes me (and there’s more to write about I fear). I have a need to be active, and self sufficient, and I am struggling with not being those things, every single day.
My history working as a mechanic, engineering my own engines and more as I went on, and then my interest in electronics, naturally led me to robotics. It’s the kind of thing that makes my spine tingle just talking about the ideas that I have (especially when I figure out how to really design and build what I am conceptualising). It lights me up.
Then I remember. I’m going to have to ask if someone will pass me those parts, and can someone fetch me this tool, and I know I know; it’s all moan, moan, moan; be thankful etc, and I am. I’m just frustrated. My life has led me to a point where my mind is still lit up like a firework show, but my body just will not comply. I’m exhausted, reliant, and I feel needy. What I really want to do is spring into action, and enact all of my crazy late night, neuron fired firework party ideas, into real, tangible, robotic genesis.
So when I realised I could combine my love of robotics, science, discovery and most of all, engineering into my children’s home education, and that they might respond to such an education, I felt that spine tingling feeling again. All of a sudden, there were possibilities. It changed from my needing to ask for help to do hobbies, to doing them collaboratively, and at the same time, being able to use them to teach. Perfect.
It was a chance to be some sort of me again. To create using material science, physics and maths, and to do so in a way that would benefit my little ones. A chance to fire up some neurons again.
Since then we have made a lot of progress and we have gone from my children not only designing small robots that whizz around the kitchen using a few gears, switches and motors, to them understanding major, fundamental, engineering systems (some of them autonomous), all while having fun. They have been able to see complex systems and break them down into core circuits, and then rebuild them to understand them as a whole. It’s been remarkable.
It can still be difficult however, to gain perspective, and for them to see just how much they learned during home education and beyond. So nothing has been more important in this area, than our recent collaborations with Aberystwyth University and their Intelligent Robotics Group. We have been down a couple of times now, but our first was during the pandemic. We displayed our robots, at a distance, at their regular Beachlab event, which helps to get the public interested and involved in robotics. It’s usually at the bandstand on the prom, but because of the pandemic it had been moved to the Uni’s physics building car park. This was Beachlab:relocated. A lot of fun.
Then we went back down to see some of the University’s projects in more detail, and ultimately took video and audio (interviews) for one of our YouTube channels designed to funnel a lot of our content (this time robotics). We were then invited back down to Beachlab this year, but we were unable to make it. We did however attend an event a little later at the Aberystwyth Public Library, while they were having their Summer Reading Challenge. The subject was ‘technology’.
We ended up being located right by the door, with a large open space for us to demonstrate our robots to the children and parents who attended, and we answered loads of questions. We had robots whizzing around the floor autonomously, we had children running up and down with some lego robots, and of course Aber Uni had loads of cool kit too. Including this time K9.
It brought home though how using this knowledge around physics, maths, coding and engineering, had now not only inspired my own children through home education, but many many other children too. We had good feedback after both events, lots of questions, lots of compliments (many for the A.R.T.I autonomous robots), which boosted our confidence, and my children now understand that they are able, even at home, to create projects that are good enough to not only inspire the public, but that they can be shown alongside a leading robotics university’s own robots. That’s pretty incredible, and it has done us good meeting such wonderful people too.
I still have very little energy though, and I can do way less than I used to be able to. I am working on this, but I can feel things slipping away in a way I cannot describe. The times we get to create and build robotics though, really gets my mind moving, and for that I am thankful. We have a good few projects coming that if we can get them done, will be absolutely brilliant.
Peace
Emma.