As I may have commented over the summer (you know- those long summer breaks where teachers sit around on their yachts lighting Cuban cigars with $100 bills they get from the taxpayers) I helped out at a Robotics Camp being put on by my local High School’s robotics team. I did this mostly because while I enjoy Technology, I am a consumer of tech, not a producer. I buy the cool stuff and use it, but ask me about the actual technical side of things and I have learned to be a great bluffer doing a lot of smiling and nodding. I wanted to learn something about how the tech works. What I don’t know makes me almost as dangerous as what I do know.
A the end of the camp one of the mentors mentioned that there was a robotics competition in Bloomington that I should look into. It seems the Bloomington Robotics Club sponsors this competition to promote robotics throughout the state. One way they do this is by providing grants to groups looking to start their own robotics program. I thought this would be a great opportunity for my kids (No, I don’t have kids, but all the kids at my school are “my kids”- you probably wouldn’t understand, it’s a teacher thing). So I put on my calendar the date when the application went live and applied hoping I would hear something quickly and put together a team in time to join the competition. Well, over Fall Break (while waiting for my valet to find the right pair of silk paisley socks) I received an email that a robotics kit had been ordered and shipped… this was a bit of a shock. I hadn’t heard anything back so I didn’t sign up of the competition! (Since my administrative assistant was on vacation) I contacted the club to find out what was going on, and my concern that when school got back into session I would just have 9 days to put together a team, teach the kids to build a functioning robot and program it… On Tuesday I pulled together three 6th graders who had attended the Summer Robotics camp, so they had background in the VEX Robotics platform we were using, and in three days we now have a fully functional robot! As “Coach” I used many sports metaphors to inspire them (“Tighten that screw for the Gipper” and stuff like that), and I ran around looking for a replacement “shaft collar” when the one that came in the kit wouldn’t tighten no matter how many metaphors I tried. I also suggested that we should at least have a proven design to start, so they should just follow the directions in the kit. Now the team has the week to consider any redesign of the initial kit, to practice “driving,” and to see if we can do anything with programming to have the robot actually do something autonomously.
So what is making me happy? Not only was I able to see three kids really excited about what a practical application of knowledge and nothing to do with some standardized test, but I was also able to see a few kids wondering how they could get involved. As a geek and an introvert being able to create a place where kids can “let their geek flag fly” is important to me. So many times kids who were like me don’t understand that while they are “a unique and special snowflake” they are not alone, that other people out there share in their interests and are “weird like me.” These three kids compete on November 2nd, I’ve told them I am happy that we have a functioning robot and we can compete. Everything else is icing on the cake. Once we finish this tournament, the goal is going to be to improve our skills, and include more kids and different projects, I just hope that they can help I guy like me, who dropped out of programming in College, to understand all this stuff. Is a PicoBoard really something you serve Raspberry Pi on?
I’ll post an update (with video) next week after the dust has settled.