Experience of robotic teaching for malaysian gifted enrichment program at PERMATApintar

Abstract

This paper presents the experience of Malaysia gifted enrichment program called PERMATApintar Negara of conducting a robotic teaching program during 3 weeks holiday camp. During the camping period, the successfully selected primary school student among all over Malaysia for the program had explored the potential of using the LEGO NXT Mindstorms bricks to instill engineering skills, computer programming and creativity among them. The PERMATApintar Negara is a unique program conducted by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) whereas highly potential students all around Malaysia is selected based on IQ test called UKM1 and UKM2. By using the LEGO NXT Mindstorms that has been largely used as an affordable, motivational and effective teaching material for robotic and programming, the camp can provide hands-on experience which gave the selected students the opportunity for creativity and sense of achievement. It has been proved that during our camp, the students can upgrade their sense of creativity by developing various types of robot with the versatility of LEGO NXT Mindstorms. Key-Words: Robotic, LEGO, Gifted, Enrichment Program, PERMATApintar