Content for teachers and students about robotics in our world. Is robotics the Perfect Platform for 21st Century Learning? Read on!.. Would you like your student robotics activities presented here? Leave a comment or Facebook Messenger me...
Robofest at Lawrence Tech draws school-age engineers and their self-driving machines
(TNS) -- The potential designers and engineers of tomorrow's
self-driving vehicles showed off their most promising work Saturday at
the annual running of a popular autonomous robots competition.
More than 300 students from middle schools, high schools and colleges
across Michigan participated in Robofest, the autonomous robotics
festival put on by Lawrence Technological University.
The competition has grown in size since its first
year in 1999 and has included teams from at least 13 states and
countries including Brazil, China, Mexico, Singapore, France and nearby
Canada.
Saturday's
event was the state championship meet and featured 93 teams. The day's
highest-scoring 15 teams will go to the Robofest World Championships
next month in St. Pete Beach, Fla.
The overall goal is to encourage students to master principles in science, technology, engineering, math and computer science.
Robofest founder CJ Chung, a math and computer
science professor at Lawrence Tech, said he wants to see these Michigan
students someday help Michigan companies compete in the war for talent
in emerging high-tech fields, such as autonomous driving and artificial
intelligence.
“I think it’s time to regain our potential by
providing more software developers and artificial intelligence
developers," he said. “Many companies are looking for software
developers for autonomous-driving vehicles, so we are creating a
pipeline of developers. We should not lose the title of automotive
capital.”
One of the competition's stars on Saturday was
Nathaniel Lee, 18, of Detroit, who will attend the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) this fall. He is a senior at the private
Roeper School where, along with freshman Steven Raphael, 14, he created
one of the most complex home-brewed robots on display.
Lee has taken part in Robofest since his eighth-grade
year at the former Friends School in Detroit. He credits his
grandmother with sparking his interest in robotics when she gave him a
subscription to Make: magazine, which features many do-it-yourself
projects.
Their mobile robot contained its own unique
electronics and circuit boards (no off-the-shelf controllers) and made
use of laser-cut wooden parts. It had the ability to see and maneuver
around the obstacles in its path during the competition — no input
needed from humans.
“It uses an ultrasonic distance sensor that sends out
an ultrasonic pulse, and then it reads how long it takes for that pulse
to come back to it," Lee explained.
Unfortunately, their robot failed to hit a ping pong
ball through a football-like goal, a key task for Saturday's
competition. Lee attributed that difficulty to the hard challenge of
reprogramming their machine in just 30 minutes to the surprise setup of
this year's robot competition board.
"We struggled a bit today," he said.
A young team from Parkway Christian School in
Sterling Heights earned applause from the audience when their robot
successfully swung its pencil to hit the ping pong ball, which was
perched atop a Dasani water bottle. Few teams could make it that far.
The robot belonged to Meghan O'Kane, 13, and Guppi
Bryant, 14, who began work on it in December with an after-school club
at Parkway Christian.
"It was hard at times, but we've been doing this for a few years, so we know how to do it," Guppi said.
Event organizers said about 30% of Robofest participants are girls, a figure they would like to increase.
Students build robotic
models from cardboard and straws to understand the anatomy and
biomechanics of the human hand. Then, they conduct trials visualizing
data in Excel to generate new ideas for improving it’s performance.
Lesson Basics
Takes 1.5 to 3 weeks of classroom time
Costs approximately $3.00 USD per student, excluding tools and microcontroller
Meets middle school science, technology, engineering and math standards (STEM)
Join us any Saturday in May for a hands-on STEM learning experience at your local Microsoft Store*.
Teachers, students, and parents are welcome to drop by the store to participate in this 30-minute project-based learning
experience. The project is designed for 11- to 14-year-old students but can easily be completed by younger students
with parental support.
By the end of the experience, participants will have learned:
• How to build a flex sensor that lets them control a
robotic finger with their own finger.
• How to use a Surface and Excel to visualize the flexion
and extension of their finger.
• Basic skills typically used by mechanical engineers,
electrical engineers, and data scientists.
Are they Household Robots? OR are they tempting Learning
Opportunities that beckon to kids? You know the answer; learning STEM content
and skills is about access to robots! Hey, the home of tomorrow is going to be
an environment that features robots, lots of them. This one is not only good
for gardens and gardeners, but also for kids preparing themselves to understand
the world they are going to create! Could be STEM Learning waiting to happen... (Information about the Tertill robot sent
to me by Joe Jones, the inventor of the Roomba Robot and Founder/CTO of
Franklin Robotics. ) 😉
Below, a very worthwhile post from EdWeek (see link at the bottom of this page)... In preparing today's students to be employable in the age of robots, Robotics itself is a perfect learning activity!It very strongly embraces and fosters all of the varieties of learning discussed in this article...
Ready for the Robots? Let's Prepare Every Student for the Future of Work
Could you be replaced by a robot? If not today, will automation claim
your job--or your children's jobs--within several decades? As anxieties
escalate about the "Future of Work," few things are certain but this:
No one can predict exactly what the jobs of the future will be.
"But what about the skills of the future? Which abilities are most vital for young people to ...be able to navigate an ever-changing economy? Turns out that's
something more and more people agree on, and it's not memorizing facts
and reproducing content knowledge. Rather, as Andreas Schleicher, who
oversees the international PISA tests that compare student performance
around the world, puts it: "extrapolating from what we know and applying
that knowledge to novel situations."
"... replace the narrow learning goals of the past 15 years with renewed
efforts to ensure that all students attain the full range of
intellectual, personal, and social skills valued in today's economy--and
the economies of the future--in this rapidly changing world.... "employability skills"--mirror the deeper learning competencies... the ability to think critically and
solve complex problems, work collaboratively, communicate effectively,
learn how to learn, and develop a mindset for continuous learning and
mastering content are the essence of deeper learning.... these are the skills that can keep students agile in
the uncertain future of work."
How Can We Foster These Skills in All Students?
"...a
traditional brick-and-mortar classroom is not the only, nor sometimes
even the best place to teach skills for deeper learning..."
"There is no question automation and robots already are and will take
on more work in the future. But it is also undeniable that the most
capable people to thrive in new and changing environments will be those
who are complex problem solvers, able collaborators, creative thinkers,
and skilled communicators..."
There's a wonderful continuum" LEGO WeDo Robotics for early elementary grades... FLL JR. (First LEGO League Junior) international competition for upper elementary students... the FLL (First LEGO League) competition for middle school and above... and then, like the Greybots here, high school level programs for the FIRST Competition, for which they are being praised in this piece...
"Atascadero High robotics team crushes 400 other groups to win world championship"
Atascadero High School’s robotics team, The Greybots, took home its second world championship title over the weekend.
The Greybots, an 18-student
team that works out of Atascadero High School but includes students from
around San Luis Obispo County, competed against 400 teams from around
the world to win the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science
and Technology) World Championship in Houston.
The Greybots last won the world championship title in 2011.
The Greybots had just six weeks to construct their robot before their first competition, the Central Valley Regional Robotics Competition, held
March 9 through March 12 in Madera, said Leila Silver, a San Luis
Obispo High School sophomore and assistant captain of media and
marketing for the team.
Some students spent as many as 54 hours a week working on the robot, Silver said.
The Greybots didn’t win the
Central Valley Regional, but they did receive an award for their
professionalism, and they secured a berth at the world championship when
they paired up with the Citrus Circuits team from Davis and placed
second at the FIRST Sacramento Regional Competition held in late March.
Finally, the team took part in the world championships held at Minute Maid Park in Houston.
“This has been a dream of
many of ours for an extremely long time,” Silver said. “Many of us
thought we wouldn’t be the team to pull this off, but we did. We
succeeded.”
“We’re feeling amazing.”
The team is not resting on its laurels, though.
Silver said The Greybots will move on to compete in the FIRST Festival of Champions, which will be held July 28 and 29 in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!
