Today, to complement the amazing Young Rewired State event going on at CoHub, TechResort ran a pilot session of ‘Nannas do Robotics’. It’s a test for some new activities we’re hoping to develop.

We want to dispel the idea that coding and robotics is only for young people. So, today, three intrepid ladies and one gentlemen of mature years learned a little bit of code with Scratch, built a Lego Wedo vehicle and programmed it to detect and stop before hitting an obstacle.

The point of a pilot session with a small group is to iron out the wrinkles in the activity before delivering it more widely. We learned that you definitely need a big monitor to see the text on the screens for Scratch and that we probably need to slow down the mouse speed so we don’t keep losing it on the screen. Also, there’s a limit to the number of people who can comfortably work together around one laptop.

That said, after 90 minutes we had a working robot car – and this was from a position of four people who had never written any computer code in their lives before.

Well done pilot group. Hope you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did.