Olympiad in Educational Robotics The Experience in the Use of ICT in a University Project to Help Costa Rican Youth to Avoid Drug Consumption

Abstract

This article presents the experience gained in the development and execution of an Intercollegiate Robotics Olympiad, as a result of the execution of the Training of Trainers in Robotics for Colleges in Vulnerable Areas of Costa Rica project, as well as the challenges developed and the results obtained by the participating students. This is an inter-institutional project that is developed jointly by the School of Computing of the National University of Costa Rica, the Costa Rican Institute on Drugs (ICD) and the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) of Costa Rica, which is oriented to prepare instructors in the area of robotics at the secondary education level, so that they can train their students in vulnerable regions of Costa Rica. In order to provide them with an option to occupy their free time in positive activities, and thus keep them out of reach the drugs. This training is given through workshops in which they are taught to create robot models using sensors, so they can program different tasks to solve challenges. And in this way they can compete and show their learning in an Olympiad or encounter where teams from the other schools benefited by the project participate.