“The most important thing that we learned from MakeX is to not give up, even in the worst case scenario, when the robot had broken parts and flat batteries, short on time and stressed, we managed to find a solution for each problem and do our best.” Said Dima, a mentor of MakeX Robotics Competition in 2018 season.
Dima, a robotics team mentor at Bitwiz Coding Academy in New Zealand, is still a student majoring in computer science. He fall in love with coding and electronics the moment he discovered the fun inside and he is enthusiastic about teaching and helping kids to explore those projects.
His MakeX team consists of 2 boys, Johnny and Ethan. When asked about how do these kids perform in MakeX robotics competition, Dima said that “they actually performed pretty good. Taking Johnny for example, he was very involved in MakeX, he was always testing and changing his program in order to optimize its work, always asking me for advices and opinions before making changes to the robot or the program.”
Dima gives advice on programming to his students during practice
Dima pointed out that MakeX provides an awesome platform for students to acquire comprehensive STEAM knowledges: “Through MakeX, kids have a fun way to learn how different sensors work, and how to program them in order to get it working. Kids gain experience dealing with various issues during the preparation and competition.”
Talking about his best memories about MakeX 2018 season, he recalled at once those happy and sad moments he went through with kids when they succeed or failed a round, “each performance of my team was an important moment of focus and worry, then an explosion of happiness or sadness.”
From his perspective, one of the greatest thing about MakeX platform is that you can always feel a variety of strong, mixed emotions. “I have attended MakeX robotics competitions for 2 times and I saw all kind of emotions present, worried parents and mentors, sad and happy kids, friendship, etc.”, he said.
By attending MakeX robotics competition, Dima said that, you get to know a lot of people coming from different countries that share similar interests on robots building and coding and he expects that he can exchange ideas and experience with them more often through MakeX in the near future.
Dima is also excited about the coming MakeX 2019 season, “Me and my teams will work pretty hard in order to come up with the best possible solutions for given tasks.”