Sunday, July 20, 2008 City eyes manufacturing niche by teaching robotics to HS studes By Katrina A. Balmaceda Sun.Star Correspondent
LIANA Villa may be just be a high school junior, but her interest in science has brought her to propose a garbage segregation scheme.
Along with three other schoolmates and a teacher, the group’s plan involves garbage trucks with conveyor belts, light sensors and machines, all of which work together to segregate garbage into biodegradable, non-biodegradable and recyclable waste.
To actualize the scheme in miniature, all they needed was robotics know-how.
Villa and her groupmates, all students from Cebu City National High School, presented this proposal in the 1st Cebu Robotics Cup held yesterday.
The robotics competition also involved two-and-a-half hours of assembling a robot that would run through a given maze. Nineteen science high schools from all over Cebu, and even from other islands, joined the contest.
Villa and her colleagues—Jay Olivar, Al Osiris Ingking and her best friend Xenia Vergara—won first place. Tagbilaran City Science High School and Lapu-Lapu City Science High School came in second and third place, respectively.
Cebu City education consultant Joy Augustus Young said the competition was part of a bigger picture—that of giving Cebu a manufacturing niche.
Robotics, Young said, is a skill taught to students in highly industrialized countries.
Robotics set
He said that along with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the Department of Education (DepEd), plans are under way to give each of the city’s 16 elementary science schools a robotics set.
Each robotics set costs at least P35,000, excluding facilities and teacher training.
The Cebu City National Science High School already has a robotics set, Young added.
While admitting that the advent of robotics in the city may replace labor workers with machines, Young said that robotics will open up jobs in manufacturing and engineering.
New fields
“Robotics will help in creating new fields, new products,” Young told Sun.Star Cebu yesterday.
Young added that he wants a robotics class to be included in the high school curriculum, hoping that teenagers will proceed to take up college courses in information technology, mechanical engineering or electrical engineering.
Villa, herself, said she and her best friend want to take up a science-related course. But while she’s sure she will take up nursing, Villa added that she wants to work in her family’s engineering business.
Their garbage segregation was actually a modification of a previous project made by older students, said Villa’s group’s coach, Elmer Invento.
According to Invento, that project had won in a nationwide competition for investigatory science projects years ago.
The robots were judged yesterday according to creative design, technical design, presentation and demonstration.
The groups were judged by Engineers Susana Tan, Leopoldo Din and Julius Sederiosa.
