Robotics and programming aren’t always easy, but Mimetics is aiming to change that. The brainchild of Myke Predko, Mimetics is a Toronto-based company that works with kids to provide an entryway into the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Our robot is fully assembled—our competition, LEGO, requires their robots to be assembled, but ours doesn’t. When you tell someone, ‘Hey, we’re going to build and program a robot,’ you set the expectation that when you’re finished building the robot, you’re finished.”
After spending close to a decade fine-tuning their educational program at the Ontario Science Centre (where Predko says they had the highest-rated activity in the history of the Centre), Mimetics is now taking their robots into workshops and classrooms. Mimetics offers sessions ranging anywhere for a hour-long introduction to a
five-day camp, and has partnered with local organizations like the Royal Ontario Museum, Ladies Learning Code, and Robots Rule.
The mission of all this robotic play is to let kids dive deeper into science and math. Mimetics is especially interested in working with girls, who often express a lower level of interest in STEM fields. Predko says that, prior to a session with their locally-made JADE robot, only 9% of girls are interested in higher-level math and science; after a session, that number jumps to 63%. “One of the big comments we get back from students, especially girls, is that something that seemed difficult now seems doable. Science and math isn’t a boys-only activity. When they come into this, they feel that this is something only the boys will be good at.” Predko says that the middle school girls that Mimetics targets are able to grasp the programming concepts and “it turns into something quite successful.”
This fall, Mimetics will partner with the Toronto District School Board in an effort to bring the JADE robot into more classrooms. “We started this at the end of the last school year, and ended up with more opportunities that we could manage. Right now, we have ten classrooms that are asking for us to come in.”