Kyoto International Film and Art Festival

KIFF Workshop Collection for Children

2018/10/14　Event

As part of its efforts to go beyond a film and art festival and contribute to the community, KIFF includes a “Workshop Collection” for children.

At Aeon Mall Kyoto’s Koto Hall a number of educational and fun workshops were held on Saturday October 13th and Sunday October 14th. In the “Yoshimoto Kids Creative Workshops,” Yoshimoto Kogyo entertainers became teachers, helping the young visitors make balloon animals, book covers and other crafts.

For older kids, there were classes on computer programing and hacking a role-playing game to make it better fit what the user wants from the game.

The highlight of the workshops was a class on programming Pepper, a humanoid robot developed by Softbank Robotics. Yoshimoto entertainers Daisuke Toyama from the comedy unit Grunge and Runpumps led the class. But the center of attention was the robot itself, which the young participants were amazed to see respond to human gestures and commands.

The participants were asked to think about how they would program Pepper to carry out a specific task, such as giving a quiz. They broke down the steps in a logical way, starting with programming the questions into Pepper, and then the correct answers, and then a function to compare the answer given to the correct answer and so on. Although most of the participants were elementary school kids, they caught on fast and were ready to move on to the next step.

Then they were asked to think about the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are designed to help the planet and all of its people. They worked on dividing action towards those goals into steps, and they thought about how to use Pepper to teach others about SDGs.

The workshop was a fun and challenging way to get the youngest visitors to KIFF thinking about SDGs.