120 school students from Voronezh took part in the Inventing Engineers program

29 june 2021

Voronezh has just finished playing host to a series of training events called the Science Sessions for students aged 9 to 12 who have showed an interest in scientific and technical disciplines. 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 Voronezh City Administration’s Department of Education and Youth Policy.

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.

Thank you for inviting us to the Science Sessions! My son really enjoyed it here. Very fittingly, he has got a mindset of a budding engineer. So, he was very excited to be able to build those models. They are the only things he would play with now. It's wonderful that children have such a great opportunity to show their abilities and discover new and useful hobbies, Victoria Tishchenko, mother of a participant of Scientific Sessions in Voronezh, said.

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.

The Inventing Engineers course is unusual and very relevant. After all, today's children’s preference is not just for some entertainment-filled pastime, but rather for intellectual activities where one has an opportunity to apply both one’s deftness with hand tools and one’s sharp mind. You should have seen the genuine interest and passion the kids were building their models with! And that is despite the fact that the construction set is was not at all easy to work with, it makes you think hard and look for the best solutions, Elena Ivanova, an extracurricular education instructor with at the Children’s and Youths’ Creativity Center (the Robotics Center), commented.