shot lıst:
- Robot dog
- Girl talking about her work
Even at a very young age, Selin Alara Örnek showed little interest in dolls and preferred making buildings out of Lego bricks. Selin, very curious about space, followed International Space Station crew member Tim Peake on social media. Her best friend was her dog Korsan (pirate).
She first learned about robots during an interview, which she did with a mechanical engineer friend of her father for a project on wind energy. As a result of that interview, she had the idea to produce a robot to help revive her dog Korsan who was sick at that time. For this, her mother arranged a coding workshop for her in a volunteer group called CoderDojo. Selin was the only girl in the class and at first rejected the idea of taking part for that reason, only agreeing to attend after the science teacher insisted she would be an example to other girls. Hence she produced her first robot: ÇirozBot. She then invented a smart dog lead to prevent dogs from getting lost. Then she came up with the idea of a robot to measure temperature for her grandfather.
While she was traveling abroad, she witnessed blind people walking with a guide dog, and this became the inspiration for her next robot. She had the idea of producing a robot guide dog in place of a real one. After six months of working on this project, in 2018, she took part in the Coolest Projects competition in Dublin and competed with 400 other children in the same category. Selin won praise from top science and technology experts in that competition, and her robot guide dog was awarded the first place prize.
In 2019, she took part in the same competition with a new robot called BB4All. She used a toaster for its head. Pete Lomas, one of the founders of Raspberry Pi Foundation, gave the robot the name Kenwood. Selin’s dream now is to create a robot with a friend, but she complains that girls of her age are only interested in taking selfies and sharing them on social media. Now she wants to create a human-like robot and is hoping that other girls will follow her into science and technology and overcome the complaint that “there are no girls” in technology.