120 school students from Gubkinsky’s schools took part in the Inventing Engineers program

29 june 2021

Gubkinsky has just seen a series of training events known as the Science Sessions for students aged 9 to 12 who have showed an interest in scientific and technical disciplines draw to a close. These events were attended by 120 children. The project was implemented with SIBUR’s support as part of its corporate social investment program, the Formula for Good Deeds, and with the support of the Education Department of the Gubkinsky’s City Administration.

Over the five days of the course, its participants spent their time tinkering with a Livetronic construction set, and, guided by their experienced instructors, assembled various engineering models: an Asimov's robot, a rubber-motor car, a catapult, and a catamaran. To that end, each child was issued with an individual set of equipment necessary for doing the practical work. In addition, the budding engineers came up with unique stylings for their design projects, learned to code an algorithm to control their robots, and carried out various experiments.

I think that the most valuable thing such classes for primary and middle school students provide is an opportunity to acquire practical skills and to better understand the various aspects of engineering based on one's own hands-on experience. What kind of power does a rubber-motor vehicle use for propulsion, which arrangement is static and which one is dynamic, or what do a pleasure catamaran and the original steamboats have in common? These are the things that children are unlikely to learn in an ordinary class setting. In that sense, the Inventing Engineers program dovetails standard school physics and math curricula perfectly, Alla Romanova, a methodologist with Gubkinsky’s Technical Creativity Center, says.

The Science Sessions project was designed to help develop relevant skills and competencies in schoolchildren with an emphasis on engineering design, robotics, and physics. It is also about helping to properly set up children’s educational and leisure activities during their vacations and showcasing state-of-the-art techniques and practices to the local academic community.

This was perhaps one of the most unusual kinds of activities that the children from Gubkinsky could engage in during their vacations, when they were offered an opportunity to build something with their own hands. The usefulness of such educational projects is obvious: school classes is one thing but a course like this one is a good example of a perfect combination of several areas of training at once: development of hands-on skills and spatial thinking, and getting introduced to the basics of mechanics. Our special thanks for the provided modeling kits that the students cannot seem to be able to part with now, Irina Zhirova, School 5’s Deputy Principal, said.