How can the impact of European Robotics Week be measured? Evaluation isn’t an exact science. As Albert Einstein famously did NOT say*: “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” It certainly isn’t always easy to measure the impact of a project or an event. Who knows what impact a presentation will have on a roomful of guests? How a simple robot demonstration will influence a young mind? Or how significant will a meeting between two people be in the future? With this cautionary thought in mind, the euRobotics Office team have compiled some statistics to measure the ‘reach’ of this year’s ERW (see diagram). Another cautionary note – the map shows only those ERW events that have been uploaded by ERW National Coordinators. We’re sure that other events also took place under the ERW banner across Europe. Even so, it’s clear that ERW activity is slowly growing again after the pandemic impacted the whole concept of physically engaging the public and young people with robotics. It may take a while for activity to reach pre-pandemic levels but the trend is going in the right direction.
*Sometimes attributed to Einstein but the correct source-reference is William Bruce Cameron’s Informal Sociology: A casual introduction to sociological thinking (Random House, 1963).