RoboCup Junior: A vehicle for S&T education in Africa?

One of the challenges of the 21st century is to prepare learners for the rising technological challenges in jobs and daily life. In order to be able to do so curiosity and motivation of the learners have to be stimulated. There exist initiatives such as the First Lego League or RoboCupJunior to spark interest in youngsters for science and technology. In a playful way, the children get into contact with technology and become more interested in these fields. In this paper we report on the experiences of the South African RoboCupJunior Rescue team AmaJukuJuku that participated in the 2010 RoboCupJunior in Singapore. From the first-hand experiences of this group of learners with a disadvantaged learning background, we show the positive effects and argue that such initiatives are helpful and important, particularly in the African context. We propose a scheme how such initiatives could be undertaken in the whole of Africa.