Studying hard and learning English. That is how the students of the robotics workshop taught by Guillermo Fonseca from Lieniz are today at the Ernesto Pinto Lagarrigue High School. This is part of the intense preparation for the robotics world championship they will attend at the end of November in Izmir, Turkey, after being crowned national champions of the World Robot Olympiad.

“The invention with which they won the national championship are laser totems, which were born from the motivation to generate safety barriers to avoid accidents to which industries such as mining, construction or others are exposed, where it is important to have alerts in spaces where we do not want people to enter,” explains Fonseca, head of Mine Planning and Maintenance.

David Toro, part of the trio of students who will travel to Turkey, explains that “when a person crosses between two totems, an audible alarm and a beacon are activated, and the system also sends a message to the administrator's phone.”

This is the same innovation that they will take to Izmir. Expectations are high, as are nerves and excitement. “Every time I hear about the competition I feel happy, I didn’t expect to come first, because there were great competitors. So now the challenge is in November, in Turkey, to show that there is robotics in Chile and that it is advancing,” adds student Marcel Quispe.

Francisco Peña, the third member of the team, describes his experience as “crazy, I had never competed in something so big. Before the workshop I had repaired some things, but I had never put together something like what we did, programming or coding. Now we are going with the intention of winning, improving what we already have and learning English.”

The workshop

Despite the success they have achieved in just a few months, the beginning was not easy for Fonseca. He offered the workshop to a number of schools, but it was not well received. “I don’t know if they didn’t believe me that I was doing this voluntarily, in my free time, or if they were simply not interested,” he says.

That is, until he arrived at the Ernesto Pinto Lagarrigue High School and spoke with the director, Cristian Valdivia, who was immediately interested. They made the computer room available and Fonseca conducted interviews to select the members of the workshop. More than 40 students arrived and 20 were selected. Every Friday, they spend part of the afternoon working with circuits, cables and tools.

As a team, they have already chosen a name and even have a slogan: “We are Laser Shield Chile and we work for a safer Chile!”