Lego Robotics Wrap-up

The fall 2013 session of Lego Robotics ended with a bang at the Bakken. The amount of growth seen in all the students was truly impressive - we can't wait to see what these future engineers might build next.

In the morning session, each pairing had two challenges. The first was to program their robot to complete a maze and end on a pressure switch that each of them made. This task is a great example of how looks can be deceiving - everyone thinks it's easy when the challenge is introduced, but it actually requires each group to use all the skills that they've learned together in a very precise manner. Nonetheless, the whole group did an awesome job battling through to the end! The pride they felt when their robots made it onto their switches for the first time was well deserved, and fun to watch!

The second challenge that each group showed to their families during the Big Show was one of their own choosing. We had several golf shot challenges, a rodeo robot, and even a very fine dance performed. The creativity and ingenuity showed here was trumped only by the persistence in seeing their ideas brought to life.

The afternoon group had a completely different set of challenges. Since this group is a little older, they got to decide as a group what the theme for their robots and challenges should be. After going through many ideas, like a relay race, sumo wrestling, construction site, and a robot dance party (dancing was very popular), the group eventually decided on Robot Olympics as our theme. Each builder came up with their own design for a robotic event, then designed and programmed the robots from scratch. The results were extremely cool. We had a bipedal discus throwing robot next to a quadrupedal cat robot that lit up our Olympic torch.

 

There was a soccer kicking robot and a hockey shooting bot. We even had a fishing robot that used magnets to catch the illusive paper-clipped mouth bass. The horseback riding robot required some very challenging programming to get both horizontal and lateral movement to mimic a horse. Not only were the parents impressed, I'm pretty sure that the kids impressed themselves.

Overall, it was another great session of robot building and programming that reinforced the idea that kids can make some amazing things with the right tools and an engineer's outlook.