Today we are back to the educational/informative posts and I wanted to discuss how kids hat are introduced to robotics are more interested in STEM as a career or just continuing it in the future.
Robotics from my experience has introduced stem, particularly engineering to people from all walks of life who may or may not have done anything like this before. Over the years I have also noticed more and more women at all of the competitions that I go to and even teams from other countries that come to competitions in the states.
This positive reinforcement of STEM at a younger age helps encourage further research and even pursuing a career in a similar field. There are a few main reasons that people don’t pursue STEM careers and I think that robotics helps people get past most of those reasons.
I did research on the topic and these were the 3 main reasons that I found. The first being people feel like STEM is too technical and complex. This is a very common misconception because all people see, are these really complex machines or huge code files. They don’t get that they can start small as they don’t really see anything small in the real world.
This is solved by robotics as you can start with a small robot or even a lego robot before you get into something more complex like a vex or high school level robot that has hydraulics and such. This way people can slowly ease themselves into the complexity in a way so that they understand it.
Next is affordability often times getting into STEM takes money that people just may not have. The average high school level robot costs anywhere from 20,00 to 50,000 US Dollars. Which most people don’t just have lying around. For this reason, there are other robots such as the Romi robot that run the same code and cost a 1000th of the price at 50$.
The final main barrier is accessibility some people just don’t have any way to get to somewhere where they can learn about STEM, nor do they have a computer to learn it off of. Robotics is once again a good solution to this as it is very accessible and there are teams all over the world that people can join.
Finally, there is also one more thing that people can use to learn about STEM and that is free websites like code.org or the concord consortium that offer lessons upon lessons about all sorts of things related to STEM. I would highly recommend that you go check them out.
That’s it for today I hope you enjoyed it and have a good day!