Robotics Summer Camp

United Way Venango County

I taught a 3-week long course with the United Way of Venango County, to show students from rural backgrounds (like myself), how accessible robotics truly is and how much positive societal impact it can have on peoples' lives.

My course was built to teach middle school students about robotics technology in agriculture, transportation, and hospitality -- the region's three most important sectors.

For the final week's course, I mentored a group of undergraduates to lead the programming in my place too.

My goal

These middle school students from this area were not very exposed to financial and educational opportunities to encourage their career choices. For example, the high school they were entering offered no useful AP courses. Their primary way to get information on career opportunities was through their teachers, making them the ultimate gatekeepers (for good or for worse).

I wanted to open some more doors of opportunity for the students by:

  1. Exposing them to the field of robotics
  2. Emphasizing how accessible robotics – Pittsburgh (1.5h away) is a major hub with amazing educational and occupational opporunity for all types of roboticists.
  3. Highlighting financial opportunities to get into robotics (Cheap DIY robots, undergraduate scholarships, undergraduate research experiences, etc.)

Curriculum

My curriculum blended the summer program’s theme of careers in agriculture, transportation, and hospitality with the application to robotics. These were the regions aforementioned three most important sectors, and I wanted to show how robotics could apply to this aspect of their daily lives and interests.

A key focus of my course was to highlight how robots help humans and are not replacing them.

The three different subjects for my course, highlighting the breadth of robotics applications. Left to Right: Week 1 to 3.

Hands-on Activities

Hands-on experiences are foundational to the youth’s learning and excitement. I made sure each week introduced a new type of robot for the kids to build, program, and work with. I also related each robot to the theme of the lesson, e.g. agriculture, and engaged the students in questions about how this robot could succeed or fail in that industry.

Bristle Bot (Week 1)

This robot is a simple and cheap ($1.92) DIY robot with bug-like behavior. It taught the kids how easy it is to create a "robot," and how accessible and inexpensive building one can be. They took the robots home with them too.

Edison Bot (Week 2)

This robot is still pretty cheap ($25) robot with more intelligent behavior. It taught the kids the common robotics paradigm: See-Think-Act. It was able to follow lines, follow light, listen to audio commands, and much more.

I thoroughly enjoyed these robots and highly recommend them to anyone looking to do educational engagement with their community. They also offer a free curriculum and worksheets to test the robot and a great free website for programming. They are great for all ages and can be programmed using a barcode scanner (easy), Scratch (medium), or Pythonic code (hard).

Kuri Bot (Week 3)

This robot was a more expensive household robot which served as a little companion. We brought this robot in to show the students how a mature system may look for people in real world robotics occupations and how advanced robotics can get with vision, speech, and much more.

Take a look at more photos from the program.