Our partnership with SEGA Girls' School in Tanzania

After last season’s Community Tournament, Piedmont Makers coaches set aside a season’s worth of FIRST LEGO League Unearthed mission mats, mission models, and guidebooks and sent them to SEGA Girls’ School in Tanzania, where the nonprofit Nurturing Minds had funding for LEGO SPIKE Prime kits but nothing to build a season around. Volunteers carried the equipment over by hand, and volunteer coach leader Dr. Ming Xu ran SEGA Robo-Explorers, a five-day program for Form 3 students who had never touched a robot. Working in teams of six and seven, they designed robots, wrote block code, wired up distance and color sensors, and took on the Unearthed Innovation Project. The week closed with each team presenting its solution to guest judge Engineer Mkufu Tindi, lead coach of Tanzania’s FIRST Global team, then running five minutes of timed missions on the donated mats.

That week became a program. SEGA’s Robotics Club has grown from the eleven students who piloted the curriculum to twenty-two across Forms Two, Three, and Four, with another ten expected, and it now meets weekly. The students from the pilot coach the newcomers, so the club teaches itself as it grows. SEGA science teachers Mr. Maturo and Mr. Dastan trained alongside the students and lead the club sessions, and the kits and mats are inventoried and stored at the school with about five years of use left in them. Gear that would have gone back into a parts bin in the East Bay is now the foundation of a robotics program run by Tanzanian teachers and their students.