USP teaching assistant makes robot out of old computer parts

In an effort to educate and inspire students to build and create inventions from material written off by most, USP teaching assistant, Goel Aman Lal created a robot that welcomed students at the University’s Open Day last Friday.

Lal says while the university buys many advanced computers and machines for students’ to learn what the current technology demands, at the same time the university writes off many machines as junk.

He says the model that was created to say Hello, Bula and Namaste, welcome to University of The South Pacific Open Day was to show that not everything which is not of use is junk and it took him a week to complete the task.

Lal adds that the model was made from computers that were written off by the university as Fiji does not have proper resources to recycle material and parts were sent to China and India to be recycled.

Lal who is a teaching assistant at the School of Computing Science and Mathematics says the robot did not have much movement but it was installed with a voice message to welcome students and used as a tool to encourage the students to venture into Computing Science, Information and Mathematics studies.