STEAM Clubs at FIT: Introducing High School Students to the World of IT

Every Monday afternoon, you might come across a group of high school students at FIT. In the robotics lab, they are discovering a world that remains hidden to the vast majority of their peers. They are members of the STEAM Club, which runs at our faculty during the summer semester thanks to Dr. Michal Kapinus. STEAM Clubs (an acronym for science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) are organized by JCMM, a non-profit association of legal entities in the South Moravian Region. This is a project unique in the entire country; hundreds of talented students have already participated in it.

The clubs “identify” gifted young people who are potential candidates for further study in technical fields. They develop not only subject knowledge but also collaboration skills, presentation skills, and creative thinking. In the 2025/2026 school year, there are twelve STEAM clubs. They have addressed and continue to address a wide range of topics, such as artificial intelligence, electron microscopy, urban architecture, and biopolymers. The Faculty of Information Technology has organized and continues to organize two of them. In the fall, it was the Machine Learning: Data in Practice club; in the spring, you can meet students from the Robotics club here on Mondays. In this club, participants learned, for example, how to program the Dobot Magician robotic arm using Dobot Studio, familiarized themselves with the basics of computer vision in robotics, and tried their hand at assembling an automated robotic production line. The highlight for the students was the opportunity to try working with the state-of-the-art UR5e collaborative robot. And at the end, they’ll be tasked with developing their own

“They really surprised me with their skill—at the start, they had absolutely minimal experience with robotics, and most of them had no programming experience either. And after just a few sessions, they’re already able to create interesting technical solutions with a wide variety of robots,” says Michal Kapinus, assessing the progress of the clubs.

You can find more information about this unique project, which is also taking place at our faculty, here.