This week we reached an important milestone 500 members, and this happened in just over 5 months since this group inception.

I’m very impressed and I think this is a great start for our group initiatives.

This would have not been possible without our members involvement and initiatives. I only hope we can grow this community further and inspire as many people as possible to get started and contribute to GTA (and beyond) robotics hubs (clusters) for robotics education, DIY, and industry.

Robotics knowledge becomes more important every day and the domain grows very fast and continuously.

September was our most active so far, we had amazing and inspiring presentations/demos by Rahul (Project Eva – moonshots.ca), Frank (Step-E www.quantumroboticsystems.com), Alex (X-Drive project) and I also showcased several times my on-going STEMCA Inventor and SPARK (personal assistant/service robots) projects.

We participated to Maker Expo and Science Literacy Week to make people aware about GTA Robotics initiatives and inspire them.

We also had some young roboticists showcase their cool projects, like Farius and Keith sons.

I also cannot reiterate enough the help we got and still get from organizations like NewMakeIt (Ryan), Markham Public Library (Ben), HackLabTO (Eric), Ryerson DME Lab (Namir) and Adventure Capitalism (Stephan, who is hosting for free this website), thank you all for your contribution to our group.

Going forward our next event is on Oct 13, this is a great opportunity to see how students are building robots for competitions and learn from their experience, also a great way to learn how we can contribute and help the teams in our areas:

http://www.meetup.com/GTA-Robotics/events/234590101/

 

Recently I read a great article on RoboHub, about how Danish Robotics Clusters have helped Denmark excel in robotics, would be amazing if we could bridge robotics education (schools), industry (robotics and related) and DIY robotics communities to achieve part of what they did, a great example to follow:

The direct link to article is here: http://robohub.org/a-look-at-a-danish-robotics-cluster/

Another great initiative is from Udacity, regarding their Self Driving Cars opensource project, courses and naondegree, they released this week a machine learning dataset and since then their Slack team membership grew to over 4500 people interested in getting the nanodegree or in machine learning and robotics in general:

https://twitter.com/olivercameron/status/783772064872181761

If you are interested in this subject I recommend you join their Slack team and follow the discussions there:

Join ND013 on Slack.
223 users online now of 4646 registered.
https://nd013.udacity.com/

More details about the project and nanodegree here:

https://www.udacity.com/self-driving-car

https://www.udacity.com/course/self-driving-car-engineer-nanodegree–nd013

I would like to end with Seth Godin today’s excellent inspiring ideas:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/10/the-chance-of-a-lifetime.html

The chance of a lifetime

That would be today.

And every day, if you’re up for it.

The things that change our lives (and the lives of others) are rarely the long-scheduled events, the much-practiced speeches or the annual gala. No, it’s almost certain that the next chance you have to leap will come out of nowhere in particular, and you’ll discover it because you’re ready for it.

Someone to inspire, to connect with, to lead. A system to transform. An idea to share. Responsibility is often just lying around, waiting for someone to take it.

Go.

Posted by Seth Godin on October 07, 2016

Thank you,
Marius Slavescu

STEMCA School of Robotics and Innovation Center
Inspiring the New Generation
Learn, Teach, Invent, Make!
www.stemca.com
twitter.com/stemcaedu
facebook.com/stemcaedu

GTA Robotics Community
Making Robotics in Toronto/GTA a Part of Life
www.gtarobotics.com
twitter/gtarobotics
www.meetup.com/GTA-Robotics