Day 24 – Lots of Kids…

Robotics Club –  I think we have about 20 kids coming to robotics club now, with 4 or 5 females signed up and attending. It’s a lot of kids but they seem happy.  I want to start doing some challenges but quite frankly they are seem pretty interested in just working and building their own robots (for now). The general idea is that a base robot will be kept together, and each week the kids will have to add sensors or make small changes, along with making a new program, in order to complete a challenge.

Vex now supplies RobotC with their robots, so I also want to gradually move kids to working with Robot C  in the text editor. We’ll see how it goes…

Day 19 – Robotics Club Getting’ Keen

Robotics – Today I had the biggest turnout so to date. Kids were excited to build which was great. The next trick will be to get them organized so that they can share robots and build challenges in one day.  Having so many kids get involved means that they are sometimes there and sometimes not – the discontinuity results in needing a project/challenge to be started and finished all in one session.

Day 101 – Line Following

Robotics – Today was a great day to see one of my robotics club members pass a big hurdle. He managed to get his robot to do decent line following. He was very proud of this accomplishment and happy to show his friends. While line following is a standard robotics function, this student had never done programming prior to this and essentially worked on the problem by himself. Well done!

Day 91 – Robotics Club

Robotics – Some good work was happening in robotics today. Some soldering, some coding, some engineering. This photo shows a few of the grade 12 students that have made some good progress this year in engineering.

Day 67 – Xmas Robotics

 

Robotics / Engineering – Much to my surprise, we’ve had problems consistently getting kids to come out to the robotics club.  We have 3 full sets of Vex IQ robots, along with 10 sets of 2wd chassis robots with Arduinos.  However, today there was a good turnout which was nice to see.

It was also great to see the kids destroy an LED! I’m not sure if they had it wired with the wrong polarity, or if they just didn’t have a large enough resistor on their circuit. Regardless, it’s a great way for kids to learn something about circuits. They all laughed pretty hard, so it will be memorable.