Wildcat Librarian: Robotics Camp 2013

It's been a month since robotics camp, but I'm finally getting around to blogging about it! I've been trying to sum up how I feel about the impact of robotics on our students, and I think I've finally got it. I'll spread a few pictures throughout the post, and a link to the online photo album with a lot more pictures is at the bottom of the post.

Robotics is all about STEM. Students don't always know it, but they are constantly learning about science, technology, engineering and math. What they always know is that they are doing it in a fun way.

Robotics is such a challenge. The task isn't usually easy and completing a project requires perseverance. Even when building the Lego WeDo robots, students have to follow a specific set of instructions if they want their project to turn out. They have to count bumps on the Legos, match them up, assemble them just right. If you've ever built a Lego project, even if it doesn't have robotic components, you know that it isn't as easy as it looks. Especially if you're only 7 years old. I've started building things, and even following instructions the best I could, find out at the end that I've put something together wrong and I have to start over, or come up with a creative alternative. For some of our kids this summer, the biggest success for them (in my eyes, at least) was that they were able to focus on a project and want to complete it so badly that they persevered when things got challenging or when they were distracted by other projects going on throughout the room. It was a personal endeavor to those kids.

One of my favorite moments--it took Jack, who is going into 1st grade, two full days to finish this car, which is an advanced model in our WeDo kits. He was the only person to finish, even though he was the youngest and everyone else was working in a group. We programmed the car to go when we clapped and it was awesome.

Another thing I love about robotics is that you never know what you're going to get. The flexibility and creativity that the kits provide is immense. At camp, our elementary students built things from instructions we found online or that came with the kits, but as kids move into our competitive leagues, it's all brain-power. At camp, we built spin art, power saws, catapults, race cars, airplanes, monkeys, lions and so much more. Our high school students have created ramps, forklifts, scooters, claws, card dealers, and the list keeps going. I am always so proud of each project.

And the most challenging part of robotics, I think, is the teamwork. Our high school competition league, FTC, calls it "gracious professionalism." This embodies teams working within their own team, and also supporting the best interests of other teams. No sport is ever like this. Everyone is working together towards a mission and challenging one another to see who can do it best. In our camp, all the students worked with partners. For some, this is tricky. Personally, I would almost always rather complete a project by myself. But, obviously, that isn't always a choice. Watching kids figure out how to work together, challenge each other, brainstorm ideas and solutions, help each other out and complete a project together always amazes me. The relationship dynamics are evident.