Supporting STEM Education in Wales

BCS South Wales has worked with SeeScience to help the public understand the importance of STEM subjects and to help young people develop a lasting interest in STEM.

Our STEM outreach work use LEGO MindStorms kits to help primary and secondary pupils to learn about computing and especially coding, in interesting and practical ways. We have created a series of lessons and helped teachers to deliver them (often doing this online to schools anywhere in Wales). For the public, we’ve taken our kits to exhibitions and science fairs.

Our aims

Our lessons help pupils learn:

• what a robot is;
• about the tasks robots can do now and potentially could do in the future;
• what the main components of a robot are;
• how a robot can respond to the environment around it;
• the basic concepts of how to program a robot, and;
• Relate robotics to other topics they know about.

Past activities

For the past ten years, we have built a team of STEM ambassadors, IT professionals, communications specialists and teachers to create our lessons and put together our public demonstrations. Our team also supports the DVLA Code Challenge in December each year.

Our early work was all in person. When COVID struck, we adapted to working online and can now offer to help both online and in person.

Our lesson plan and videos are all available to STEM Ambassadors on the STEM Resource Hub (and, we are busily creating versions in Welsh).

Photos:
1. Lego Robots training day for volunteers in October 2017.
2. Lego Mindstorm kit, configured to play Tic-tac.
3. Volunteers delivering a Lego Robots demonstration at Margam Castle in August 2019

Future activities

In 2023, we will recruit more members to the team and roll out our lessons to a wider audience. We’ll attend more science fairs in Wales. A number of events are already planned such as the “In it Together” festival in May when we will be making presentations throughout the event.

How to get involved

If you would like to know more and perhaps get involved, please let us know by contacting the BCS South Wales branch chair by email at swales-chair@bcs.org.uk and he will put you in contact with project members to answer any questions you may have.