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constitution has to be edited more than ten times as the term “ROBOTICS” was
totally new for the Chief District Officer's (CDO) office of Kathmandu. Defining the
term ROBOTICS so that everyone, including officers in Chief District Office could
understand was challenging. Despite being in the capital city, Robotics Association
of Nepal is working as NGO because robotics is the least concerned matter for Nepal
Government and people in general but in fact it is very important aspect of technical
education.
There were lots of challenges both internal and external faced to run the associa-
tion. Internal challenges were dividing responsibility, renting office space, managing
resources and time within the organization. External challenges were raising funds,
getting support from colleges and universities. One of the major setback occured
when juniors pursuing final years of engineering were handed the responsibility of
leading the association in less than 6 months of formation.
The association was then reformed with a new executive committee of 11 mem-
bers, Sunoj Das Shrestha was elected as the President, Suresh Ghimire as the
Vice President, Pavitra Gautam as the General Secretary and Elisha Rajbhandari
as Treasurer. The team was handed major responsibility for 2 years time.
Since its reformation in 2010, Robotics Association of Nepal has made a number
of efforts for the development of robotics in Nepal. It has conducted numerous
orientation programs, workshop and trainings related to robotics for students from
school and college level to undergraduate level. Till date, the numbers of students
participating in these workshops have exceeded 1000. These training programs vary
from simple line following robot making to RC controlled airplanes.
Activities
The only advantage that we had was robots are fascinating to everyone, even for
those who are not interested in science, engineering and technology. Science and
engineering students are naturally interested in making robots because it is fun to
watch robots in action and it's more fun if you can make your own robot.
This is where we saw an opportunity to integrate robotics into science, technology,
engineering, mathematics and design (STEMD) education. A national level robotics
competition “Yantra 1.0” was planned as grand challenge for students from schools
to engineering college. Based on the theme and rules of the robotics competition, the
content of the robotics workshop was generated. Every engineering college and its
Principals and Head of Department of respective college were convinced about the
idea. In this way, a network was build and each college had two RAN representatives
to bridge RAN with college administration and students.
As there were no expert on delivering workshop to engineering colleges, trainer
from India was invited for the first three workshops. Later we started delivering work-
shop which was in fact more effective because students had problem understanding
Indian trainer. After engineering colleges, we conducted basic robotics training in
+
2 colleges and schools. We were excited from the feedback that we got from
