IEEE SSIT Lecture | Design and Deployment of K-12 STEM Program in Tunisia’ Public Primary Schools by Dr Nizar Rokbani
IEEE UK and Ireland SSIT Chapter and SSIT IST-Africa SIGHT are cooperating to organise this SSIT Lecture as a joint webinar.
IEEE and SSIT Members as well as non-IEEE Members are invited to register and participate. IEEE Members should include their IEEE membership number when registering.
This joint meeting will take place online. Registered participants will be provided with the link prior to the event.
Abstract
“Robotics for Equality and Democracy” is a STEM and educational robotics program deployed in Tunisia public schools as a partnership between IEEE Tunisia Chapter SIGHT and the academic inspection for primary education of Dar Chaabane II, Nabeul, Tunisia Republic.
This lecture will describe the program implementation’s main steps covering alignment with local educational system policies and regulations, the educator’s training, the organization of the learner’s activities and their assessments based on a project based methodology. The IEEE STEM portal and the Try-Engineering lesson plans were the main resources used to build the teaching/training materials.
Trained educators deployed educational robotics activities with their pupils, and then engaged them in a project building dynamic leading to a competition and demonstrations in a public event called “Nawadina”, our clubs.
The program was developed as extracurricular clubs. Pre-interviews and a post-interview were arranged to measure how children perceived the robotics activities and eventually how those activities influenced their perception of STEM and engineering.
Speaker
Dr Nizar Rokbani is an Assistant Professor at the University of Sousse, Tunisia and an IEEE Senior member. He has served in several volunteering positions in IEEE RAS and SMC Tunisia Chapters since 2009. He organised the IEEE Robocomp robotics competition from 2010 to 2015. He is very active in promoting open hard electronics with a specific focus on robotics and related applications as well as promoting STEM and early engineering activities.
His research interests include applications of intelligent techniques such as swarm intelligence, computational intelligence, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms to robotic systems and industrial processes. Dr Rokbani published about 14 journal papers, and 20 Conference papers. He served as an organising member in several National and international conferences including IEEE ICBR, CEIT, AMTM, and ICCAD.
Dr Rokbani has received several IEEE awards including the Meritorious Achievement Award in Pre-University Education, IEEE Educational Activities Board 2019, IEEE USA, “For significantly increasing the impact of the IEEE Teacher In-Service Program (TISP) in Tunisia through the Robotics for Democracy program”; The IEEE R8 Chapter of the Year 2019 Award; and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Chapter of the Year Award, 2017.
