Lucía is 8 years old and has a robot in her hand. She tries to program its movements through commands she sets on a computer. Leaning on a small wooden table in a cramped room with bags of portland resting against unpainted walls, she stares at the android in fascination and says, "I've never seen this before." }
It is the first week of February and Lucía is on vacation. She is not operating the robot in an educational center or in any special activity of Antel. She is doing it in a house -still under construction- located next to hers, in a small housing corridor in the Nuevo París neighborhood. She does it because a dozen UTU students decided to give their time and knowledge so that children and teenagers like Lucía can enjoy learning.
"Our idea is to show a lot of kids the things that can be done with technology and at the same time give them tools to guide them in what to study. And also to give them a recreational space because many kids don't have the possibility of accessing beach vacations," Yamila Figueredo, a 20-year-old student of the basic vocational training program (FPB) of the UTU of Colón, told El Observador.
The young students do it as members of Uniendo Barrios, a neighborhood association with social purposes that organizes activities to help the community in different neighborhoods of the capital. This one in particular is called Tecno Verano and is supported by Antel, Inefop, UTU and Codicen, who have collaborated with the donation of the materials that the young people have for their classes (computers, robots, boards).
The idea began in 2017 when four UTU students - among them, Figueredo - met in a parallel course they took at the Cerro Industrial Technology Park (PTI) on Technological Literacy where they were taught programming, robotics, website creation, among other subjects.
"We met at the Cerro and decided to get together to do something different, to help the community. So in January 2018 we started the Tecno Verano experience until the first weeks of March," says Figueredo. Now, for this new summer season, the group expanded and came to complete a dozen. They decided to split up and form two groups that go to different neighborhoods in the same week. One group goes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; the other goes Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Both groups teach their informal classes between 3:30 and 6:00 pm. Every week they change neighborhoods.
In the classroom, where the two groups of "teachers" are together, there are two wooden tables. On one of them are two robots that are controlled by a cell phone. On another is the Butiá, the robot most coveted by the children, which is programmed through orders that are arranged in the Turtlebot application of a computer of the Ceibal Plan. At the same time, there are desktop computers in the process of disassembling and analyzing their internal parts.
"First of all we show them each part of the CPU, what it is for, what it is used for, what its name is, the basics. Then we show them how to disassemble the parts and then they have to identify them and tell us what they are for and what they are used for. Then we show them how to connect the cables, how are the peripherals, input and output, among other things," explains Figueredo while moving the pieces of the PC.
The student says that up to eighty children have participated in their activities, but this time they settled in this area of New Paris knowing that they were not going to exceed ten because "the important thing is not that there are many or few, the important thing is that they can learn about this that we like so much," she says.
Experiences
Lucia now has a doubt about the operation of the robot she drives. When she asks one of the youngsters how to solve her difficulty, another girl, Belén (11), tells her with determination: "Here, I'll help you".
Belén had already participated in another activity, in her neighborhood, and this time she asked the young people to continue learning in this new activity, in another neighborhood. The ease with which she handles technology is notorious and now she teaches Lucía as if she were just another young teacher. Her indications are clear and she waits to see if she gets a positive reaction from the other side before asking "do you understand?
The role of teacher is a role that is not always easy to fulfill. This is how Juan Rodríguez, another of UTU's students, 20 years old, understands it. "I was always a student and this is like a new role for me. It's complicated at first, but it's a matter of experience and knowing how to communicate with the children, because at each age you communicate in a different way. You learn that with the classes you give," she says.
Rodriguez had stopped studying formally for four years until 2017, when he joined the Technological Literacy course at PTI, met Figueredo and two other young people and participated in the emergence of this idea. "That's when I felt like studying again," says the person who finished this year's Secondary Technological Education (EMT) in Computer Science at UTU.
When he reflects on the desire that motivated them to undertake this idea, he thinks of it as a rewarding investment. "We wanted to do volunteer work through what we like. This way we both learn: we learn how to be - in inverted commas - teachers and they learn from us what we know, and that's how we go," she says.
A few seconds pass and he expresses a new phrase that, according to him, summarizes the purpose of the project: "I give you and you give me".
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