Robot School - Putting Things Together

A group of seven middle schoolers at the end of the day is, as they say, "a tough room".  There's a degree of background nonsense that you have to adjust to.  After a quarter century of doing this I'm pretty acclimated.  Anyway, here's the group in front of their large project.

Swell shirts, they are similar to the high school team's uniform but say Robot School 2023 instead of Avis Automata 5826.  There is of course only one way to hand out robot shirts....

We've adjusted the psi on the pneumatics plus the arc on the arm such that it launches things in a manner appropriate for a school setting.  T shirts at about 15 feet.  It pitched a little Buzz Lightyear figurine about 20.  For some reason when we visited the Dungeons and Dragons group it was able to toss a couple of 20 sided dice about 30 feet, but they roll pretty well.

On to what I'm calling the mini robot project, a sort of rehash of Machines Behaving Badly with basic pusher robots.  The tech is obviously way below what we are just wrapping up, but there is another reason to do it.  We are going to set them up 3 on 3 in what is essentially a miniature FIRST tournament.  Complete with tricky rules that will make them need to formulate tricky strategies....