Genoa Science Festival 2023: the School of Robotics workshops

For the 2023 Genoa Science Festival, School of Robotics has imagined intriguing workshops for boys and girls, and for adults.

You can find them here

Detective Coding: Do you want to approach programming and computational thinking in an immediate and fun way? This workshop is for you: it is an introduction to coding in which you will apply a computational approach to problems that need to be solved by writing a programme, just like people who do it every day in their jobs. To achieve this, you will use visual programming languages (such as Scratch and Pocket Code), which allow you to write programmes by composing blocks of instructions, a bit like Lego bricks, until you become real programming detectives. Book them here

Our online traces: Through our online actions, in internet searches, in the use of a web browser and many other apps, we leave indelible, and unconscious, traces of our passage. And, in fact, by using digital services, we give away our data to governments and multinational corporations. This workshop aims to promote awareness of the consequences of our digital actions, to understand how we can better manage the sharing of some of our data and our privacy. A three-stage activity – inspiration, conception and implementation – will lead us to build applications that use digital footprints, so that we can better understand how they work and what they entail that we use every day on our smartphones and many other internet-connected objects. Book here

What is the secret of a navigator? Finding your way with algorithms: What is the idea behind route planning by a navigator such as Google Maps? The secret lies in the concept of a graph, used to represent a map in which arcs represent roads and nodes represent intersections. This is where mathematics comes to our aid, because there are several algorithms for finding the shortest route, the most famous of which is Dijkstra’s algorithm, which, unlike others, keeps track of the current shortest distances between each node and the starting node and updates these values when it finds a shorter route. In this workshop, you too can become nodes in a graph and learn how to be guided by the footprints left along the path to discover, thanks to the algorithms, which is the best way to get to your destination. Book here