Robotics Club – We’ve been getting consistent turn out for the robotics club, which is nice. There has been more progress with having the same kids show up every week, so hopefully we can enter some local competitions in the upcoming weeks. Students seem agreeable to the idea but on the other hand, they really only work on designs of their own interest and not what the competitions are about.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Robotics / Engineering – I was catching up with my classes today, after missing three days last week. For physics I was lucky to get a physics substitute teacher, and she went over inertia and a spring force lab. In science 8, students continued with their infectious disease research projects.
The photo above is a photointerrupt sensor that I’m trying to get more of for our robotics club. Kids are putting together 2wd robot chassis controlled with Arduinos. Eventually I’d like them to try and use wheel encoders for controlling motor speed. I need more of these sensors to match the encoder disks on the wheels.
Robotics Club – We’re trying hard to kick off a robotics club. There is a lot of interest and on this day there were about 25 kids that showed up just to talk about and draw/imagine what their robot might be able to do. I’m raising money to purchase robots, and I also bit the bullet and bought 10 sets of robotics equipment using my own money. I hit ebay and amazon and got Arduino clones, ultrasound sensors, photoresistor sensors (for line following), h-bridge, chassis, cables, etc.
BC Physics 180 