The Central University of Technology’s organizing committee for the upcoming Entrepreneurship Week (EW) is doing the final touch-ups for the event, and so are those who will be showcasing their ideas and products. One such person who will be presenting his idea next week is Dintwe Teboho Africa.
He aims to show off an educational robotic kit he designed and wants to use to promote science and robotics among younger children. “I hope that it will inspire younger children to have a keen interest in electronics, programming, and robotics as areas of science that often are shied away from as they are perceived as difficult. When you watch online videos, you see young children in China producing magnificent robots. With this kit, I would like to create that kind of culture in South Africa.”
With the kit, Africa has built a toy car that avoids obstacles to showcase what kind of robots can be built with it. Among other things one can design with the kit, which he named the “Arduino Cool Kit”, are an alarm system, disco lights, traffic light, robot toy car as well as a drone robot.
He also adds that the kit comes with a manual that explains in a very basic, yet easy to understand, terms how to build these very items.
Working as a lab assistant at the University’s Fab Lab, which is a studio designed to help students with the incubation and prototyping of ideas, he says he hopes to receive enough funding to one day make this project (and others) commercially viable.
Elizabeth Conradie, the manager of the CUT Idea Generator(an entity that works closely with FabLab), says she hopes the school will be able to foster a culture of idea generation, entrepreneurship and even incubation for those with great ideas who need honing and developing, at the forthcoming event next week. She hopes that the University will become synonymous with such projects, not only in Bloemfontein but also in the Free State.
EW will kick off on the university’s Bloemfontein campus on 29 up to 31 March 2017 and attendees can expect everything from presentations on intellectual property, presentations by staff and entrepreneurs alike showcasing their business products, a TEDTalk as well as the announcement of winners from those who took part in the Entrepreneurship Competition, with categories for staff and students. The event will be held in the Gymnasium Hall from 10:00 to 12:30 every day.
Pulane Choane- Courant News
