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| Victor Kawagga, Ugandan Robot Builder [Photo:Reuters] |
Victor Kawagga is a softly spoken young man, but his quiet manner can't counter the eager sparkle in his eyes and the passion he has for the machines he's surrounded by.
The bedroom of this house in the Ugandan capital Kampala has been converted to a home lab, and the young people hard at work here are building robots.
The 'him' he is referring to is Solomon King, the 29-year-old technologist and businessman who takes robotics into the classrooms of Uganda as the founder of Fundi Bots.
"He stalked me," laughs Mr King, bending his head slightly to fit his lanky frame into the doorway.
Now Victor and 12 others spend their days at Mr King's home working on projects that involve using locally-sourced materials - in this case bike chains, spokes and the like - to build a robot that will move, sense water and light, and transmit signals to a receiver.
Victor wants to go to university - but this is Uganda, and for ordinary people higher education is expensive.
The government-funded scholarships don't always go where they should. Fundi Bots - fundi is Swahili for maker or artisan - is his chance to learn about a world that might otherwise have been denied him.
I, robot
The everyday applications of robotics might escape the casual observer but, Mr King says the science has clear and practical applications for life in Uganda.
"Fundibots for me is like a way to build a new breed of thinkers and innovators," he says.
"The thing about robotics is it's one discipline, but there's a million sub-disciplines in it.
"I keep telling the students that when they've finished their first robot, they've learnt about electronics, they learnt about logical thinking, they've learnt about programming, mechanics, you've learnt a bit about biology, you've learnt popular science."
"By the time you have a small army of people who have done robotics at some point in their lives, their mindset is no longer the same. They look at solutions from a creative angle."
