Teaching 5th Grade Electronics

I'm pleased to say that I'm shaping young minds into engineers, leading an after-school club called Technology - Robotics - Innovation at my daughter's elementary school.

Week 3 is coming up this Thursday.

Week 1 was introductory and included a fun bridge-building team exercise where we got to flex our teamwork and problem-solving muscles. 

Week 2 the kids had fun learned about electronics: voltage, current, LEDs and built their own LED circuit on breadboards. 

Great news: half the kids build non-working circuits. Exactly what I'd hoped for! See, I didn't tell them that LEDs conduct current in one direction so that they could learn through thinking and discovery. 

Students came up with great ideas on what might be wrong and some discovered that flipping the battery connections lit the LED (nice!). When I told them about LEDs and diodes, they fixed their circuits by flipping the LEDs.

We'll build on the LED circuit and their light-sensing soldering kit circuit to develop sensors for line following. After Thanksgiving, they'll build team robots. Then we'll start on programming!

I plan to publish the curriculum and materials as open source / creative commons for others to use and help us improve it.

This is a dream come true. I've been wanting to teach these things for several years now and I'm super excited to finally have that opportunity!

Robot Sumo with Lego Mindstorms

Two deadly, plastic opponents face off.

Their beeps and whirs are drowned out by the deafening cheer echoing in the elementary school auditorium.

Two robots enter the sumo ring. Only one emerges, victorious. The other? Tipped over, out of the ring, parts scattered, wheels spinning in futility...

The culmination of many weeks of tinkering, teams from the Robot Club at my girl's elementary school faced off against teams from two other schools in a Lego Mindstorms Sumo death match (ok, they didn't call it a death match... but I sure will).

For several weeks I came in every week to help the kids design, build, and code their robots and it was incredibly fun and rewarding. Turns out 5th graders are really smart. The kids had no trouble with the LabView-style graphical programming and had working robots quickly.

There were a few physical design issues. Teachable moments in the area of physics were plentiful. Center of gravity. How caster wheels work. Traction, friction. Stuff like that. In the end our school fielded some very competitive robots!

One team started a few weeks behind but was able to build a tracked robot (below) based on some instructions I dug up. They fought against time for weeks and finally, in true robot experimenter fashion, got their code working only days before the competition.

I built one, also. And battled the kids. And lost more matches than I won!

I guess I am not smarter than a 5th grader.

But I definitely couldn't be more proud of these kids for sticking to it, never forgetting to have fun, and building some awesome sumo bots.

Sparkfun AVC 2016

Sparkfun announced that the 2016 Autonomous Vehicle Competition will be happening in September this year!

That's good. It'll be cooler than summer, almost certainly sunny and a pleasant 70-80 degrees. Plus we have loads of extra time to procrastinate. Win-win!

The big news is they're making some kind of addition to the AVC involving -- if the pictorial hint is to be believed -- little kids driving around in home made go-karts?!? Or... I really don't know...

What does it mean!?!?!?

Maybe autonomous road racing? That'd be sweet. Maybe kids will race with bots? Maybe robot kids will... nevermind.

What about me? Though life has been leaving boot prints on my backside for the better part of the last year, IF the AVC additions are super-interesting, Data Bus may have to make a comeback.

I haven't forgotten about rovers. In fact, I've been working on some Rover-related goodies in the meanwhile...