Robot School 2023

It's back.

In the summer of 2019, pretty much on a whim, I invited some promising middle school students to come work alongside the high school robotics team in an informal setting.  This was dubbed "Robot School".  It was a considerable success.  In fact there are a half dozen upperclasspersons now on the team from that casual experiment.  Most of them in leadership roles.

We had another, larger Robot School in the summer of 2021.  This was an official summer school class.  Seven current members "graduated" to Team 5826 from that crop, and another half dozen or so were direct invites from Robot School Children.  If you are looking for six or seven newbies a year to keep up with the lamentable tendency of students to graduate, this is a very effective recruiting and training machine.

Time to fire it up again.

This iteration is in the afterschool program and is limited to current 7th and 8th graders.  We set the limit for Robot School 3.0 at seven and it filled very quickly despite a 5am online signup time.  This was done so that employed people had a fair shot at getting their kids in.  The waiting list has 16 names on it.

Building a basic drive base.  This thing has been assembled and disassembled multiple times and is getting a bit beat up from that.  Oh, and from being crashed fairly often.

The return of Snack Challenge.  It takes various forms but is always something they should work together as a team to figure out.  Sometimes they don't get the extra good Robot School snacks if they can't manage a solution.  But this problem was significant enough that they needed to work on it with decent blood sugar levels.  And they did find a solution.

CAD designing a bracket for the next stage of the process.  This is a kid who had never touched a CAD program before.  Now something he designed is being laser cut for fabrication.

Another part of the crew is working on control systems.  They are over in the other room but do wave through the door way to be sociable.

Some excellent future team prospects in the bunch.  Current team members and coaches are trainin' them up right.