AROTEC

AROTEC

VIsion statement

Enabling learning through experience.  

Mission statement

Create a present where learning is fun and effective by allowing students to experience what they learn through interactive projects and build the next generation of innovators and inventors.

The problem we are solving

In a world increasingly changed by digital technologies, Although Africa holds nearly 17% of the world’s population, its Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) capabilities fall behind the rest of the world. According to the African Development Bank, less than 25% of African higher education students are in STEM fields, with the majority of students. over 60% of Africa’s population is currently under 25, with Africa containing 19% of the global population of 15- to 24-year-olds. By 2035, sub-Saharan Africa will have a working population larger than the entire rest of the world combined, however too many young people do not have the skills or opportunities to be part of shaping this change.

• No access to stem education in Africa, and lack of supply of STEM jobs in Africa 

• The lack of resources and toolkits to address the needs for STEM lessons and activities in schools. 

• Not enough young people have access to opportunities to learn these skills — 75% of students in England attend schools that do not offer computer science for high schools (age 7–16). 

• The technology sector in Africa continues to grow, offering huge employment opportunities. More people are needed to fill a growing skills gap by contrast not enough skilled workers are found in Africa.

What is the purpose of your organization?

we develop products and programs that tackles the lack of practical lessons around stem in classroom by offering an integration of hardware and software learning tools that allows student to be engaged and experience emerging  technology without the need of expensive labs. 

How does your organization serve its target population and why?

We design and manufacture learning tools that area easy to use, cheap to manufacture and has an  african identity which allows to easy integrate into african classroom, that student with little to not previous contact with stem able to assemble, learn and play. These hardware come with simulators and programming tools that complete the learning process. 

We have developed a program called "little engineer" that offer teacher trainning, simple courses for the students to know more on how to use thier kits.

Cristovao Mario Cacombe is our team lead, he organise the project yearly goals and alongside other we organised the project quarter goals. Cristovao communicate the company goals to the rest of the team and he managed that these goals are following into the small tasks the team takes. 

Cristovao has also responsibility of leading our research into new project, new partners, where he analysed the possible partnership and align with our goals and aim. 

He also communicate with our mentor to assure all milestone and KPIs are being achieved on the most efficient way possible. 

Our TEam lead and supporting team are made of 4 people, namely Cristovao cacombe, Jonilson coreia, Elvira fernades with the mentorship of Wilson pembele, we believe the team is well-positioned to effectively support the LEAP project due thier experience and commitment to the project we are doing. 

Our team lead Cristovao cacome is Msc engineering from imperial college london, UK and BEng Electronics engineering from Newcastle university he is a con-founder and Director of our project, having been recognised as a lead innovator in the area of education and engineering by the royal academy of 
International robotics expert , he is responsible for making major corporate decisions, driving the direction the company, the team lead is committing 2-3 hours a week for the per week on the lead project. 

Our support team 

Jonilson Correia  a Bsc information technology froM Oscar Ribas with more than 3 year of robotics experience non leading education team int robotics competition will be supporting during the research. 

Elvira Fernades  a Bsc accounting from Methodist university and Registered accountant the COO of the project will be assisting with all the administrative work involved on the project. 

WIlsom pemeble a Msc in engineering and more than 15 years experience on education and engineering is the our mentor and adviser and are open to spend 2 hours a week to assist us during the leap project. 

Arotec offers products that makes learning  fun and effective by allowing students to experience what they learn through interactive kits.

In a world increasingly changed by digital technologies, Although Africa holds nearly 17% of the world’s population, its Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) capabilities fall behind the rest of the world. According to the African Development Bank, less than 25% of African higher education students are in STEM fields, with the majority of students. over 60% of Africa’s population is currently under 25, with Africa containing 19% of the global population of 15- to 24-year-olds. By 2035, sub-Saharan Africa will have a working population larger than the entire rest of the world combined, however too many young people do not have the skills or opportunities to be part of shaping this change.

• No access to stem education in Africa, and lack of supply of STEM jobs in Africa 

• The lack of resources and toolkits to address the needs for STEM lessons and activities in schools. 

• Not enough young people have access to opportunities to learn these skills — 75% of students in England attend schools that do not offer computer science for high schools (age 7–16). 

• The technology sector in Africa continues to grow, offering huge employment opportunities. More people are needed to fill a growing skills gap by contrast not enough skilled workers are found in Africa.

• high cost of setting labs for practial lessons 

• lack of support for teachers and schools wiling to easy integrate stem, robotics and AI on their curriculum 

We offer a complete learning kit called arobot that come with a an online programming and iterative software that is easy to use and is inspired by African identity.  

Arobot’s two motors are connected to a microcontroller which communicates via Bluetooth with an open-source electronic prototyping platform, enabling users to create and programme interactive electronic objects.

The robot is battery powered with its body and wheels made from recycled 3D-printed plastic.

Arobot has ultrasonic and ultraviolet sensors which allow actions to be programmed through artificial intelligence-informed programming. A Bluetooth sensor connects it to a laptop so the robot’s actions can be coded and executed via an interactive platform. It can also be connected to a mobile phone.

Arobot comes unassembled and needs to be built from 3D-printed parts. It is usually assembled by groups of four children, which encourages collaboration and teamwork.

With the help of an instruction manual and a series of YouTube videos to confirm the build is correct, and users then code simple robot tasks in developed block programming, Scratch or other programming languages.

The robot can be programmed to use its sensors to move in all directions, avoid obstacles or follow a specific path.

the robot has already provided more than 200 Arobots to over 20 schools, reaching over 1,000 people, including dozens of teachers who have been empowered to educate their pupils.

the solution is used on our programs on eight technical education centres we operate where Arobot lessons are offered. The online platform provides robotics, STEM and AI courses which enable Arobot to be programmed for tasks such as racing against other robots.

we focus on Formative research through case studies, user interviews and pre-post or multi-measure research. 

We have conducted 23 studies cases in 20 schools and 3 open community to evaluate that the use of our product and kit affected positively the schools and community in 4 areas such as, first, improved interested of the students on the practical classes our kits offer compared to non practical classes our classes using other tools, second general improvement on student performance over the years when using our kits and program , third increase o student turn over to schools when more practical lessons are offered, fourth,  increase on stem careers choose for students who used our products during primary schools compared to other students. 

Results of our studies cases were 87% of students showed improved interested of the students on the practical classes our kits offer compared to non practical classes our classes using other tools, on data of 4050 students assessed. 

Classes room have 3 times more students on the practical lessons showing an increase o student turn over to schools when more practical lessons are offered.

and 2040 students who has been used our kits are choosing interest on the stem students and choice. 

To evaluate our impact we run user interviews with both students and teacher that allows to keep improved the product and lessons and program that use our kit 

And  the 20 schools we worked for so far we conduct a pre-post or multi-measure research to evaluate the impact of our services.

The data collected from our studies allowing a pull of more than 6000 students and 20 schools and more than 16 cities in Angola revealed the following results: 

studies cases were 87% of students showed improved interested of the students on the practical classes our kits offer compared to non practical classes our classes using other tools, on data of 4050 students assessed. 

Classes room have 3 times more students on the practical lessons showing an increase o student turn over to schools when more practical lessons are offered.

and 2040 students who has been used our kits are choosing interest on the stem students and choice. 

To evaluate our impact we run user interviews with both students and teacher that allows to keep improved the product and lessons and program that use our kit 

And  the 20 schools we worked for so far we conduct a pre-post or multi-measure research to evaluate the impact of our services.

Our organisation needs two type of support to strengthen the evidence base of our solution:

The first we need to reach more students on a rural areas in Angola as we have so far reached 16 cities out of 18 cities, this would help us to evaluate the impact across all the children background and impact and how it compared to most rural areas of the  Africa, to better benchmark our impact. 

We need support to tailor our solution and keep benefits the overall goals of long term impact goal.

1. Can we efficiently scale education solutions across multicultural sub-saharan?

2. how to manage impact goals and finance goals on the education solution to continue to bring the solution to more users?

Our desired outputs on the program is to design a better study to evaluate our long term goals of measuring impact of students on their careers choice after using our solution. For this we expect the program to give us strategies and frameworks that successfully worked on similar conditions to the one we are operating and we area able to evaluate them and compare to the methods we are currently use to improve our data collect and impact measurement and management. 

We further expect by sharing our methods and solution have support on how to improve and better access our methods. 

Our organisation plans to implement the output of the LEAD project on the studies and assessment we are currently doing, by improvement our impact measurement KPIs. And using our own team on a short term access our data collecting and data assessment and improve our impact measurement.

Our long term desired of the 12-week LEAP project is to have more better metrics and framework on the impact measurement and to better know who was impacted, how the organisation is progressing . 

We want to understand that our organisation is progressing towards the goals we have set and meeting our KPIs.