The Garneau school vibrates with robots

For the past few years, all the students at Garneau Elementary School have been doing robotics. If there is one moment of the week that the young people of this school in the Centre-Sud of Montreal do not want to miss, it is the one spent with their robots.

Marie-Eve Morasse
The Press

“We have a little bit of a problem, but we’re fixing it. »

Maeva, “six and a half years old”, had just explained how the little Dash robot she was programming with a friend was going to move on the floor and follow a very specific path, “like a figure eight, but upside down”.

It didn’t go as planned. Leaning over their tablet, Maeva and Mariana noticed that the robot “is not listening” and urged the journalist to come back in a few minutes for another demonstration.

Like all the other students at the Garneau school, the little ones do robotics for about an hour a week. In this school located in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal, this is the project we chose to mobilize students and teachers.

Joël Beaudoin explains that the robotics period he does each week with his students from 1^D year is a learning opportunity: you have to measure the distance the robot will have to travel, know how to read the programming blocks that tell the robot sometimes to turn, sometimes to back up.

Young people, says the prof, realize “that there are different ways of getting to a goal”.

The first robots at the Garneau school were purchased in the wake of the Digital Action Plan set up by Quebec in 2018. However, the teacher who had set up the project left for another school, and the robots are ” dormant”.

Teacher Denis Gosselin picked up the ball. “I’ve had an interest in it since I was little. We said to ourselves: we are going to bring this to life, these robots,” explains the person in charge of teacher training.

The school principal, Jean-François Lafleur, insisted that “everyone get on board”, students and teachers alike.

There had to be continuity from one level to the next, and no student would be left behind. The Garneau school is at the maximum of the scale of deprivation of Quebec, “10 out of 10”, says the director.

“We must not hide it, we are in a multiethnic sector, where parents cannot always help children with their homework”, says Bernard Bazouamon, president of the school’s governing board.

According to the Montreal school service center, 70% of the students at this school come from allophone families.

When it comes to robotics, everything is done at school, observes Denis Gosselin.

“I have been teaching here since 2008 and I quickly understood that it was the children who had to be involved. You have to work with them,” explains Mr. Gosselin.

Challenges for robots… and children

In the class of 3^e year of Bruno Vincent, these are drones that the students learn to guide in a course. The machine must go around boxes and pass under a stick.

Penelope says she likes handling the drone, “telling ourselves that we can do it and working as a team,” she explains.

That students collaborate is precisely one of the objectives.

In a team of students, it’s hard to talk about. “What happens if the drone drops the boxes? asks a student. These drones are not bilingual: how do you say “turn right, but in English?” asks Émerik, 9 years old.

In all, the school invested approximately $80,000 in equipment for its project. We now have about ten robots per level, computers, tablets. Dash, Sphero and Blue-Bot are getting ready to go back to their boxes for the summer holidays, but one thing is certain: they won’t be gathering dust for long.