🧓 🍑 📃 Cashback in a robotics club, or how my students earn on their skills 🚣🏿 🔰 🍐

Greetings to all members of the community! My name is Vladimir Mozgovoy. I am the founder of the Robo.Grade private technical creativity center in Novocherkassk.

In this article I want to talk about my experience in attracting my students to various works - children from eight to sixteen years old. Read about successes and failures, about “pitfalls” in this kind of educational practice.

1. What is the idea?

The idea is simple and lies on the surface. My colleagues and I teach children the skills that an engineer really needs for adult development. While in other CTTs children are “taught Lego”, we teach them applied computer science, soldering, Arduino programming, circuitry and operation of CNC machines. It is bearing fruit. At some point, the student "suddenly" is in a state:

replace the module on a smartphone or repair a computer;
set up a simple network equipment;
reinstall the operating system on the PC or reflash the smartphone;
Diagnose and troubleshoot a UPS or Arduino board
write firmware that implements relatively complex functionality;
draw a drawing and make parts on a CNC laser;
to fix my mother’s washing machine, meat grinder, slow cooker, etc;
adjust the slicer so that a complex model prints efficiently;
in the end, to develop the device and the simplest accompanying documentation for it.

... in general, it becomes a really useful member of society. When this happens, the student finds work almost by herself.

2. Where does work for children come from?

Firstly , despite the fact that I graduated from the university two years ago, students and teachers contact me with enviable consistency on the manufacture of mock-ups, instruments, documents for them, etc. Since I have no time to physically do such things, I delegate such work to those guys who can do it. And there are already quite a few of them, and there is even some competition in this field, which leads to an increase in the quality of task performance.

Secondly, in a circle regularly something breaks. Dummy power supplies, connectors on holders with batteries, Arduino boards, printers and coolers, power supplies and monitors ... The teachers and I fix the equipment ourselves. But, again, there is sorely enough time for everything. And it would be “not counting the losses”, if it were not for the horde of greedy for “Repair! ..” mechanic, which with our efforts we have grown in a couple of years of work.

Thirdly , students often go so deep into studying a topic that their knowledge and experience is already of some interest and can be incorporated into the learning process. In such cases, I instruct the students to draw up manuals according to the given criteria. The results are sometimes just incredible!

Fourth: help with events. Adjustment of sound equipment, distribution of leaflets, “bring-give” - this field of activity is traditionally assigned to students of any circles, not just mine.

Life hack:

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Fifth : Some students have built up a very good reputation as masters in the repair of complex electronics. Here is a very interesting example. The 11-year-old kid was not afraid to undertake the repair of a portable ECG, in which the tape drive was stuck. In addition to a certain amount of money, the guy also got such gratitude:

A trifle, it would seem, but it's nice when the kids appreciate the work so much.

In addition, the parents of the students serve as sources of orders. Someone needs to engrave or cut something, someone needs to set up a computer or charging for the battery, someone needs to print a part from the mixer. Our system administrator, keen on infrastructure optimization, also needs padawans for all kinds of dialing / crimping ... There is nothing to list.

3. What are the benefits for students?

I pay money for the work of children. All this is done by agreement with the parents of the students, who so far have never been against. Payment is calculated in proportion to the time spent by the child, the quality of the assignment and the urgency of the work. Sometimes a student instead of money asks for some spare part from the warehouse, which I also consider quite acceptable.

The first reasonable question arises : is it legal? Formally, these relations are not labor data, since they do not appear regularly, and their occurrence completely goes along the “cashback” column in expenses. Moreover, there simply cannot be an employment relationship with children under 14 years of age.

Second question: is it ethical? Here I can say with confidence that more than. Remembering myself and my comrades at the age of 10+, I remember very well that even then there was a need to buy new hardware on a computer or to raise money for something else. As a rule, in our area, the work available for a teenager was to dig out / weed a garden from a series, lay out bales with hay in the hayloft, clean stalls with animals, cut firewood, “pull” bricks at a construction site, etc. Wages per unit of time fluctuated around two hundred and fifty rubles per day for a rather complicated work.

When I started this "cashback service" in my circle, my goal was to show children that working with both head and hands, you can earn faster and more. Some children at that time already tried to work as promoters in advertising agencies or as car washers. And for them it became a revelation that “just by writing a program” you can get the same amount in a couple of hours as in two or three days of distributing leaflets.

In addition to earnings, there are two more key factors that determine the benefits of such a “side job”.

First: children are accustomed to the idea that work can be paid, and that they can already earn money. I believe that it is necessary to accustom them to this idea from an early age - after all, many think that they are too small to earn. As soon as children eliminate this attitude in themselves, their progress in the development of applied skills becomes simply colossal.

Second: updating skills through a form of activity such as PAID work is probably the most effective technique that can be. A skill without application is quickly forgotten. But the skill on which you made money for a new computer is hardly forgotten.

4. Further development of the idea of part-time jobs for children

In all this practice, the case where a twelve-year-old boy decided to build a full-fledged business for the production of products on a laser machine and a 3D printer is quite remarkable. He created a logo for himself, came up with a brand name and launched an advertisement for his services on Avito, and then began to form a portfolio in instagram . And he did it - he didn’t have many orders, but they had them, and he always had money to eat-go_v_kino.

Nowadays, almost all students who have mastered vector graphics even at the most amateurish level conduct "nano-businesses" of this kind. This "movement" is not regulated by me and the teachers, and the kids just have fun.

Against the background of all this, the idea arose that it would be nice to teach capable and ambitious children the basics of financial literacy and project management. The fact is that looking at the work of the “business” of a twelve-year-old boy, I noticed all the same problems and errors that I had when I started the circle. And, in my opinion, it would be really useful with children to try to “play” the business with engineering skills.

At this moment, this is just an idea, which is just being drawn up in a separate training manual (by the way, it would be interesting to hear in the comments the readers' opinion on what issues should be addressed in such courses in the first place - write, I will be glad to discuss this topic) . But a little later it will be a fully-fledged training course with a completely practical bias.

5. What should be remembered when working with children?

Firstly , that children are children :)

In what way does this manifest itself? Most often, their sense of responsibility is not yet very developed. And having taken up work, they can easily “merge” with the wording “this is boring”, even with a substantial fee.

This implies the task of monitoring performance and careful selection of the contractor. I’m not saying that this is not so with adults, but with children who work part-time, control is needed x10, especially when they are willing to fulfill orders from third-party clients, rather than “circle assignments” (in such cases, you should be ready to pick up the order and complete him instead of a child artist).

Secondly, again, theft problems. Having received some credit of trust from the teacher, as well as having started to carry out assignments on an ongoing basis, some students cannot control their instincts. Illustrative is the example of one of the main characters of my debut article .

Thirdlywhen children work on the territory of the circle, one often has to check to see if they left a mess behind them. For those who now thought that I do not understand the essence of my work, I will explain. It’s one thing when the classes are held on a schedule - yes, there is total control, and they remove the children behind themselves in any case. But it happens that a pupil rushes in with round eyes and a cry of “Clever order! Can I go to the workshop ?! ” And having received approval, he does his work, and I do mine. And if then you don’t check whether everything is cleaned, it often turns out that not everything is at all . In part, video reports here help parents. But this kind of control still takes time, and I have not been able to come up with any more effective punishment for the mess left - my very little experience working in other companies affects it.

Proceeding from this, a somewhat deeper problem is already emerging: in this kind of “practical training”, as such, training fades into the background, while education is in the foreground. Perhaps I will cite an idea that seemed interesting to me, by the authorship of Oleg Novosyolov, about the difference between these concepts:

The essence of the learning process is to give knowledge. The essence of education is to overcome the influence of harmful instincts.

This is what I am for. Having taken up the provision of capable students with work, I hardly made my life much easier. On the contrary: despite the excellent, sometimes, results, the very “x10 control” draws quite a lot of energy. Being a manager of dozens of projects at once is very problematic. Sometimes, I hold on only to the thought that I am doing my pedagogical work as efficiently as possible, and this is not giving illusory results now.

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And finally, so that the article does not end with such gloomy chords of unresolved problems, I want to share a picture of the mascot of the whole circle,

which one of the students recently made (caution - anime):

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When he handed me this, I was straight +100 in spirit!

That is all ... Welcome to the comments!

Cashback in a robotics club, or how my students earn on their skills