On 4 August, Festo partnered with the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre to launch its Mechatronics Laboratory in Newtown. Festo donated two million rands worth of training equipment towards the facility.
The resource is a mechatronics engineering training system/laboratory for secondary schools, which addresses manufacturing, employability and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. The hope is that this facility will improve the human resources needed to drive the industrial manufacturing core of the South African economy by closing the skills gap, improving employability and increasing productivity.
“Festo is both industry and education. We focus on building skills as much as we focus on building industrial productivity. We take industrial technology and put it into the classroom. We see the partnership with Sci-Bono as particularly valuable to address the secondary school market to increase the number of learners with maths, science and technology so we get more engineers and artisans who are the technology core of the country and therefore the future of the country,” says Horst Weinert, Festo Manager – Didactic Southern/Eastern Africa.
This state of the art facility, which launched during National Science Week, is suitable for Grade 10 –12 learners and will provide training and guidance to support technical curriculum development.
The laboratory is equipped with learning systems which make industry-relevant technology easy to use in the classroom, e.g. bionics, pneumatics, electrics, 3D printing, robotics and mechatronics kits that are hands-on, fun and simple to build and prototype, ensuring learning-by-doing, culminating in the assembly and fault-finding of a small manufacturing factory with similar processes and components to what would be found at industrial production lines. This adds fascination to the theory of mathematics, science and technology subjects, informs career choices and promotes employability by bridging the gap between industry and education.
The Festo Sci-Bono Mechatronics laboratory is located on the corner of Miram Makeba and President Streets, Newtown, Johannesburg.
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