Hit the Road

As IMC, our goal is to minimize the differences caused by the inequality of opportunities between our peers. For this reason, we visit schools in regions that do not have the proper conditions, and we tell them about robotics and organize various activities. In this way, we introduce them to the FIRST Foundation and FIRST contests. As part of this project, we went to Diyarbakır in February 2018, Giresun in February 2019, and Sinop in February 2020. We totally visited 15 schools and introduced the FIRST Foundation and FIRST principles to nearly 3500 students, more than half of them were girls. We organized entertaining workshops and introduced them to robotics, and we also showed that girls could also be successful as men in this game. Within the scope of one of the workshops we organized, we let the children design their dream robots by using their creativity and build their designs by using LEGO sets. In addition, with the “Longest Tower” event, we wanted students to build their towers in the most efficient way by drawing attention to the requirements of teamwork. Apart from these, we have taught programming to the students in a fun way with our “EV3 Programming” workshops.

We visited Sinop province which is the northernmost part of our country this year. During this visit, we instilled FIRST values in village schools and schools where children with limited opportunities were educated and created STEM camps. As a result of one-to- one and group training with more than 300 students, we have opened 1 FLL team. We informed and developed children interested in robotics. We are not only limited to our own country, but also in the schools in Armenia, China, and in schools where our school works together with Erasmus + projects, we are spreading FIRST values and building teams. In the summer of 2017, we designed a website where students in China could access robotic and programming resources that they could not reach because of internet restrictions in the country. Our school carries out many Erasmus + projects with schools in Germany, Austria, and Denmark. We talked to the teachers in these schools about FIRST and then wanted to set up FRC teams in their schools and invited us to their country. Although we could not go to their countries because of financial reasons, we have not lost contact and continue to help them away from teaming up.