On Thursday October 7th both Primary 6 classes attended a digital webinar with Amazon. The live 1 hour session was highly engaging, fast moving and well presented by a group of Amazon staff demonstrating the whole process from clicking and placing your order to your packages arriving at your home. The webinar was a mixture of live streamed interviews and demonstrations of each step your package takes, videos explaining the technology and also interactive multiple choice questions. There was an opportunity to have staff respond to you questions in a live Q&A session at the end.
We were fascinated by the amount of digital technology used by Amazon to carry out work in their factories and distribution centres. We learned all about algorithms, databases, computer science and cloud computing as well as how they are used to make Amazon as efficient a company as possible. Keeping the process as quick and efficient as possible. We were so shocked to see that all products are stored on ‘Pods’ which are completely controlled and moved around by robots. The robots scan QR codes on the factory floor to constantly update their position and to plan the fastest route to a human picker. Staff who must access the floor in an emergency must wear a custom made AI safety vest that cost Amazon around £9.8m to design. We were also shocked that the products were all stored randomly as the Amazon research showed this was actually more efficient than organising and storing products in alphabetical order or grouping them in any way. We also loved seeing some of the other machines in action and finding out about ‘machine learning’ so that technology can adapt and learn to keep the company as efficient as possible. We were shown how quality control was carried out at various stages.
The ingenuity and forward thinking of the company was so exciting, as well as their dedication to reducing their carbon footprint by cutting packaging by creating more ‘frustration free packaging’ and purchasing over 100,000 electric vans. It was a great opportunity to interact with such a modern and exciting company with over 1.3million employees, we agreed as classes we are all familiar with those smiley boxes!
Scott said “I thought it was really interesting to see some of the machines and I was shocked at what they did. Looking at them I wouldn’t have guessed what they could do.”
Jack said, “I thought it would be a normal deliver service but it’s so much more than that!”.
Erin thought, “It was really interesting because I thought it would just be a video of how they did it but there were all these robotics. We actually heard from real workers!”.
Jake said, “I like there was a real Q&A quiz and the interactive questions so would could join in.”
