Middle School Robotics Spring of 2018 - Chapter Two

If the goal of the middle school robotics classes is to give up and coming recruits a taste of the high school FIRST robotics program we are off to a most excellent start. By which I mean all sorts of things have gone awry and there are obstacles to over come.

A snow day.  In April!  This threw the build schedule off entirely.  My solution?  Invite the Tuesday builders group to attend the Thursday programmers group and vice versa. We have kids interested in both who are "cross training" in this fashion.

A couple more issues cropped up.  While we have kids trained in on a metal cutting saw I had not realized that the geometry of the set up does not allow us to cut longer sections of metal.  Like, uh, the lengths you need to actually build a robot.  So it was improv time with some work a little less precise than I would have preferred.  On a similar note the available stock of prefab 80/20 was used up more quickly than I had expected.  (But not more quickly than I should have expected).  So the upper works of the robot will have to be made of lighter materials.  This is probably good in any case. I'll have to buy some stuff....but a lesson for me this time, there is a budget for complicated projects, it is not necessary to build entirely from scraps and left overs.

So it is starting to look like a robot.

Our high school programmer who is helping with this is making slow headway.  Neither he nor I had expected this much difficulty getting the wireless control system up and running.  I have a student or two working alongside him on the notion that understanding why things don't work is a superb basis for eventually understanding why they do.  I asked one of the middle schoolers so employed "so, does this stuff make any sense to you?"  His answer was "sort of" which already puts him ahead of me on the software front.

Assuming that hardware and software continue to work in parallel we have eight sessions left.  That should be enough to get something running.

Meanwhile kids are learning some new tools.  The "Chop Saw" seems a particular hit although it is an imprecise cutting method that I should not be teaching them.  Soldering, tapping holes, making and working with a jig...all somewhat reasonable stuff.

I've even tried out a few new construction methods that should factor in next year on the high school build.  

Any session with some progress and no bandaids in a good one.