Golden Gear Robotics

About

Golden Gear Robotics runs school holiday programs in the main school holiday periods, and school incursions throughout the school year.

For the younger age group we use LEGO Edison robots, these are programmed by running them over bar codes as well as simple graphical programming. They have multiple sensors so they can follow lines, detect obstacles, respond to sounds and more! Students work in pairs or small groups.

For older kids, we use EV3 LEGO Mindstorms education edition robots, which can be programmed to follow lines, identify colours, detect obstacles, make sounds and more! Students work in pairs building and programming the robot to complete various challenges.

With scratch and Makey-Makey kids of all ages can create electronic sculptures which interact with the humans around them in creative and interesting ways.

Kerry Mahoney has a background as a psychologist involved in adult education. She has taught life skills to ex-offenders, ex-drug-users and long-term unemployed. Les McFarland has worked in computer-related fields for 30 years. He currently consults to several Victorian universities on issues relating to the use of information technology.

Since 2014, they have been designing and running hands-on activities in schools focused on science and technology.

Kerry has coached teams of school children in both the First Lego League (an international robotics competition) and Robocup (a local robotics competition aligned to the ACARA technology curriculum).

Their passion began with teaching their own children about science and technology, and wanting to help all schools build on their predominantly liberal-arts backgrounds, to become places of wonder, inspiration and supported learning around science and technology.