“When you grow up you can work with robots like us…”

Reach Robotics & ADLIB join forces to inspire a future generation:

As part of our overarching mission to enable growth and to support individuals and businesses to achieve their ambitions, we’ve crafted initiatives to address common challenges that we hear named as barriers to enabling growth. These include upskilling opportunities, leadership capacity as well as “closing the skills gap” and inspiring the next generation of talent.

To be true to our mission of closing the skills gap, we stepped forward and did our bit to contribute by donating 15 Lego WeDo kits to St John’s Primary School, after their “Digital Leaders” made a video in a bid to get funding (but unfortunately didn’t win) from BT Tech Factor.

The Digital Leaders programme allows kids to take responsibility for their digital equipment. The Digital Leaders themselves range from ages 7-11 and support their teachers and peers with computing, e-safety, computing resources and ensure that the equipment is looked after across the school.

With their dedication, interest and passion in computing at such early stages, we thought it only fair to give the children an example of where building digital skills can really take them. We introduced St John’s to Reach Robotics: a local, passionate team of innovators driven by a creative yearning to entertain, inspire and educate the power of tech and the potential of consumer robotics.

To coincide with Problem Solving Week, the Reach Robotics team gave a truly inspiring assembly talk on how the robots are built, the programming and tech behind them, the building of video games and gave some engaging demos of the robots in action.

Showing children that you can get paid to build robots is a message that we hope will stay with them. But maybe one of the most poignant takeaways explained by Reach Robotics was this: it’s the people that make a company work and it’s the people with unique skills that collaborate to make amazing things happen. Artworkers, Designers, Software Engineers, Coders; they function together and the results can be extraordinary.

The kids’ reactions to these remarkable robots (as they were programmed to crawl through the middle of the school hall) said it all. When asked “how many of you want to get into robotics after this?” most of the hands in the room were raised.

We hope the kids (and teachers!) enjoyed the assembly service. If this can inspire even one budding career from this early age, we’ll have achieved our goal.

A huge thanks to Reach Robotics, and thank you to St John’s Primary for having us all.