Students use robotics to facilitate daily life in rural areas

Getting up early, feeding the livestock, milking the cows, taking care of plowing the land, planting, harvesting... these are just some of the many activities that make up life in the countryside. Tiring routine that can be facilitated through the use of robotics. At least, that's what initiatives developed by students who had their first contact with the area promise.

An article reported by Folha de São Paulo brought the example of Victor Matheus de Jesus. Before going to school, the boy had to get up very early to feed the family horses. Until the young man took his first robotics classes at the school where he studied, in Viamão, a municipality located 25km from Porto Alegre (RS). The unit is one of the 15,000 institutions served by the Connected Schools Program.

The initiative has the management of Telefonica Vivo Foundation and was created in 2012 to offer courses to rural teachers and implement laboratory schools for experimenting with digital technologies. Not only that, but introducing robotics as a means of solving problems that are part of the students' routine. Victor's school was chosen precisely as a laboratory to respond to rural needs.

Okay, but let's go back to Victor's routine. His problem was to facilitate the way of feeding the horses whose daily ration was placed individually, that is, from trough to trough. It was. Because Victor developed, based on his classes, an automated trough. The equipment was made with a bicycle strap, a board of pins, nylon ropes and an Arduino board, a system that allows the creation of automated equipment.

Now, the supply of troughs is no longer done twice a day for a single replacement the night before consumption. Yeah, it made Victor's life a bit easier! And, anyone who thinks that this was the only good idea developed at school through robotics classes is wrong! A group of students is currently developing a greenhouse that can prevent the destruction of vegetables by frost, a serious problem in the harsh winter of the southern region.

Concurrently, another team is working to produce a prototype that more effectively understands the use of inputs in agriculture. The work provided by the Connected Schools Program, which takes the focus away from the classroom to experience the practical concepts, it works so well that it encouraged Victor to continue with his studies at a school technique. Your dream? Being a zootechnician!

Initiatives for the drought in the Northeast

Water scarcity is a real and well-known problem in the Brazilian Northeast region. The water issue becomes a challenge for the rural producer since any plantation or creation depends on the element to survive! Even the supply of tanker trucks is insufficient to meet the demand for daily consumption and use in agriculture and livestock practices.

The scenario made students from a municipal school in Vitória de Santo Antão, in the interior of Pernambuco, try to solve the problem. The young people's objective is to develop a system that allows the garden to be irrigated despite the long intervals between water supplies. Once again, robotics comes into play and, with it, a group of 20 students from different grades have developed a type of intelligent vase.

The project was built with soil moisture sensors, the Arduino board and LED lights. The equipment should only release water according to the plant's needs, avoiding waste. Students, however, do not intend to stop there! The next step is to create a device for use in the garden itself, “a system that sends messages about the need via Bluetooth to tablets and cell phones”, explains Everton Tadeu Gonçalves.

He is the robotics tutor responsible for guiding students. The difficulty in expanding initiatives like those in Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco is access to technology. In fact, a good part of the 60,000 rural schools in Brazil suffer from a lack of infrastructure minimal, such as water and sewer networks so, imagine what the simple use of computers is like in these locations!

In the Folha article, UnB professor Eliene Novaes Rocha points out the need for “pedagogical proposals suited to the reality of the subjects of the field because the school expels its students when it does not contribute to the construction of knowledge that helps them to have better conditions of life". The starting point, according to her, is to dialogue with the community and thus train teachers and the pedagogical curriculum.