Storming Castles and Forming Friendships with Catapults, Robotics and Code #MakerEducation
Nice coverage of RPI’s Center for Initiatives in Pre-College Education 2017 Robotics Camp from the Scientific American Blog.
The challenges were quite involved, requiring a suite of sensors to follow lines, avoid prohibited areas of the board, steer around obstacles, and aim projectiles. Phillip and Josiah (both 9) had particular trouble with getting their robot to travel along a squiggly path marked on the ground. “Oh man, we spent hours getting that to work,” Phillip said. But it was clear that the hours they spent were a point of pride, not embarrassment. When asked which parts they would pick out for future students to work with, many of the students named the parts that they personally had struggled with the most. Dylan (8) put it bluntly: “Because that part was really hard for us, and challenges are supposed to be hard.”
Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!