The week has flown by. Posting was a challenge with the constant power outages but our team and the Haiti students showed up each day. On Tuesday we leave so we have one more day.
Sam Paulson: We got them excited about adding more function to the robot. We had them build a grabber mechanism so the robot could pick things up. They used this in conjunction with the color sensor to complete complex tasks of moving and picking things up. Then we had them build a shooter mechanism which launched balls. This got the very excited and soon they were programming the robot to aim at their friends, luckily it couldn’t cause any harm. Another really interesting thing is an older man maybe mid-twenties named Louis got very interested in the programming aspect and expressed his drive to want to learn more programming languages, not just used for the Lego robot. Overall, it was great to have an impression on a wide range of people and I’m glad to know they will learn and teach each other more.
Rocket Otte: We worked extensively on using the skills that we taught them to solve complex problems, such as transporting rolls of tape and lego blocks using a grabber mechanism they built. You could see that the kids were participating in the essence of robotics which is using your imagination to come up with a potential solution to a problem and then experimenting with it and adjusting it until the problem is solved. The kids started warming up to us so the day was filled with fun and laughter. I was given the nickname of Frize, which means wise owl in Creole.
Patrick Myslik: On our third day with the students we built two mechanisms. One that could grab objects and another that could shoot plastic balls. We used these to describe how a gear moving in a circular motion can be converted into a straight motion and vice versa and how this can be applied to everyday things like a bicycle.
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