Robotics: Can we design a robotic arm?

This resource provides a set of videos of a practical investigation aimed at supporting working scientifically in the classroom and relating science to real world experiences, presented by Professor Brian Cox and Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock. In this video, Maggie joins a teacher demonstrating a robotics-based classroom activity, including set-up, demonstration and the experiment being taught with a secondary age science class.

In the second video, we visit Chris Cieslak at BladeBUG to find out about his work designing robots to inspect wind turbine blades, before visiting Dr Christos Bergeles at King’s College, London, who is developing image-guided surgical robotics. The second and third videos focus on the skills required to work in these areas and offer young people an insight into which subjects and skills they may wish to pursue later in school and beyond. These resources could be a useful tool for careers advisors and form tutors to use during careers discussions. There are accompanying resources available to download.

This activity is based on an original activity from ESA’s Mission X: train like an astronaut project (https://www.esa.int/). Original concept by ESA / NASA who have kindly agreed to its use in the Royal Society Brian Cox School Experiments.

This resource has been provided by the Royal Society.

Classroom experiment

Chris Cieslak at BladeBUG

Dr Christos Bergeles at King’s College, London