Ringing in the New Year with Robots

Last Thursday we had our seventh meeting of the Robotic Dudes. A few days before our meeting, one of the other coaches contacted me about sharing robots, which I think will be a great thing. At this point, we've all built the basic model straight out of the book. The idea was that if we've all got stock model builds sitting there in the closet, we might as well share them so we can have several groups working on their own hardware at the same time in the class.

Based on the kindergarten feedback, I had one group working on adjusting the robot's arm so it would be two separate arms that would alternate up and down instead of one larger arm with both sides going up and down together. I gave them a little hint which gear they might use to make it work, and they did the rest. They put some little "hands" on the ends of the two arms, and it worked great. At that point, their unfocused creativity took over, and they spent the rest of the time building a big tail and putting ears on it so it looked like a dog or something. As soon as they left, I took off the tail, but I did leave the ears on it. Mostly, I didn't want the other team when they borrow our robot to have this big thing hanging off the back of it.

Honestly, I think that in addition to having a robotics club, they should just have a Legos club, since that seems to be what a few of them are most interested in - just building stuff with Legos. I've explained a few times that they need to learn to program and have some idea of what they want their robot to do before it makes sense to build something. Maybe I need to completely disassemble our existing robot and have them rebuild it just to get some of that out of their system.

I think today I'll have one group focus on the dancing robot for the kindergarteners, and another group will focus on accomplishing one of the tasks from the Hydro Dynamics Challenge. I think they'll be excited if we do the toilet flushing one.

Tomorrow is the school STEM night, where several groups from the university will come over and do all kinds of fun STEM-related activities (plus pizza) to get kids excited about science. There will be a robotics club booth, where each team will take turns for about half hour apiece, just being there working on their robots. We don't present anything, just be there doing something and available for people to ask questions about what we're doing. Should be fun.