JOSH Howard has no trouble fuelling his appetite for circuits and machinery on his family’s poultry farm in the Upper Hunter.
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Josh, 12, the youngest of three Wards River brothers who commuted to Newcastle Library last week for the Hunter TAFE-run Bots in Books robotics course, has learned to dismantle and rebuild the machinery scattered around the farm.
“My grandfather had an engine he really wanted me to fix a few months ago,” the year six student said.
“It was the engine for a fire fighting pump. I think he was pretty surprised how quickly I did it.”
At the end of his trip to Newcastle, Josh returned to his family farm knowing how to code a robotic arm to pick up a whiteboard marker.
Such are the baby steps that can lead bright, gifted Hunter kids into burgeoning fields such as drone technology, course coordinator David Leask said.
“What they’re learning is that maths and science that they learn has relevance,” Mr Leask said.
Amid the layers of code the students, aged 12 to 18, are prodded to embrace their inner artists.
Mr Leask said he challenged one student who devised a randomised lighting system to name a use for it.
“I told him, if you’re trying to drive a machine on an unknown, you could create a catastrophic event. So what can you use it for?” Mr Leask said.
“He thought about it and said, ‘disco lights’. There’s an uprising in the creative side of coding and robotics that we’re seeing.”
