Photos courtesy of Nick Visuthikosol.
At Choate, students are encouraged to give back to their communities, whether it be in their home countries or on campus. In the summer of 2019, Nick Visuthikosol ’22 co-founded A Robotics Opportunity Thailand (AROThailand) to give back to his home country. This organization combines his passion for robotics with his vision to improve the Thai educational system.
Visuthikosol, a member of Choate’s Advanced Robotics Concentration signature program started, AROThailand after visiting a local school in Thailand with his robotics club adviser. Visuthikosol donated three Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics kits to the school and taught students there every week.
“These schools barely have enough money to buy a computer for each class, so it’s basically impossible for them to have any access to robotics or anything like that,” he said.
Once the Covid-19 pandemic set in, AROThailand shifted gears, compiling a robotics syllabus tailored for online learning. “We weren’t able to go teach the kids at school. It’s hard because robotics you have to be there, you have to physically build the robot,” said Visuthikosol. Instead, his team uploaded videos of themselves onto their website, where they taught students how to use various robotics tools and languages on platforms like Pygame, Onshape, and SolidWorks.
They also introduced the students to Mindstorm EV3 kits and Micro:bit, another hardware kit that is compatible with both block and text-based programming languages. “EV3 and Micro:bit are different types of foundations where you can build a robot, which gives the kids a bigger array and variety of tools to work with,” said Arin Tongdee ’23, who is on AROThailand’s product development team and helped with the recordings.
In the summer of 2021, AROThailand hosted a virtual robotics competition on VEXcode VR, a web-based virtual robot program. Their goal was to empower competitors during a time of uncertainty through robotics. “The students were very enthusiastic about it and they really wanted to do it and learn from it,” said Prim Tangkaravakoon ’24, a member of AROThailand’s media team. Then, the staff trained teachers at their partner schools so they were well-equipped to teach robotics. AROThailand also hosted several fundraisers, and raised 100,000 baht ( about 3,014 USD) to provide robotics kits.
In the future, AROThailand is planning to create a platform for more schools to request robotics kits, teachers, syllabi, and other robotics-related learning material. “We’re planning to build our own robotics kit for Thai students to use and learn from. We’re planning to make it cheap so it’s easily accessible,” said Tangkaravakoon. They are also trying to expand their outreach to more local schools in Thailand and outside of the country. “Schools love this because they don’t have the opportunity, but they just don’t know about this yet,” said Visuthikosol.
