The Regional Center Concept for RoboCupJunior in Austria

The future wealth of western industrialized countries like the USA and the European countries will strongly depend on the availability of highly educated people for research and engineering. But already today these countries face a lack of such people. One reason for this is that science and technology is not very attractive for young people. Hand-on experiments and education had been proposed as a promising solution to this problem. In particular educational robotics has been very successful. In this paper we present the structure and results of the RoboCupJunior initiative in Austria which promotes science and technology by hand-on tasks in the robotics domain.