What is Elsys?
Elsys (in Bulgarian TUES) is a technology school in Sofia. It is a subsidiary of Technical University of Sofia and this week they've celebrated their 25th anniversary. Elsys is not an ordinary school, they teach computer science to these young kids. And they do it pretty damn well. At the moment it's the best school to study IT (software, hardware, networks) in the country, contrary to what TU Sofia has become :(.
As one of the school sponsors I met lots of the students and want to show everyone else what they are doing. I have no doubts we will be hearing more about them in the future.
Robots first
So these boys and girls make robots. I was there when the first image was taken. It was this week in Thursday, April 25th at an educational fair. All visitors were fascinated by the robots and stopped by to watch and play with them. I personally wanted to see and play with the quadcopter shown above but it was not available that day.
While I was there, a guy approached the kids and said his company wants to fund development of another quadcopter. He wanted a bigger one, which is able to carry equipment for aerial photographs.
What shook me was that this is a rare occasion where a local business wants to fund R&D activities. Not to mentions these are school boys, not university students or research fellows where this is more common. And this happened days after the news about the quadcopter has been released in the social media.
Elsys also teaches Arduino classes where students play with home made robots. I personally have attended a robots competition held in the school where these small robots compete and sometimes fight with one another.
Did I mention they take part in First Lego League too? Just see the photos.
Open source
When not making robots students from Elsys hack open source and as it happened, one of them won the grand prize in Google Code-In 2012 (article in Bulgarian). For the last few years kids from Elsys are taking part in Google Code-In and according to the school website they've made $7300 from Google :). Over 40 boys and girls took part in the first edition of Google Code-In. That's 10% of all participants.
I'm sure Google and others were impressed by the fact so many good developers are coming from a single school. Aren't you?
Cisco Networking Academy
Yup, they have this too! Elsys teams have won top honors at 6 of the last 8 BANA-sponsored National Networking Competitions. Cisco themselves wrote an article about Elsys.
Want to help
As I said I'm a school sponsor. Probably the smallest one. If you want to help these kids and their school just let me know. I will put you in touch with the principal.
Alternatively you can donate your time and knowledge and start teaching an interesting class at school!
Or you can donate high quality IT books if you have such. Anything helps.
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