Career Ready for Robotics

Getting to know the Centre

From 23 June to 17 July, the Centre had the pleasure of hosting Franklin Okoye, a high school student from Edinburgh interested in a potential future career in computer science and engineering. During his stay, he conducted a series of interviews with the members of the centre to find out more about the career paths of different members and how the research conducted in the centre contributes to society.

Learning about Robotics with Marty

Throughout the internship, Franklin explored real-world robotics and programming. Members of the centre introduced him to Marty, an educational humanoid robot used to teach the basic concepts of robotics. He used the Marty Blocks Jr. and Marty Blocks platforms on the Marty website to create simple programs that guided the robot to dance and navigate around a map. As his skills developed, Franklin progressed to using the laptop’s webcam and Marty’s machine learning tools to control the robot using colour cards and gesture recognition, eventually moving on to programming Marty using Python. 

Career Ready – National Social Mobility Charity

Franklin’s visit was made possible by the structured program, organised by Career Ready, that included a month-long internship for students across the UK, with more than 30 students interning in various parts of the University of Edinburgh.