RobotFest 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 09:46AM Images Here
Now that I've had a day to recover from RobotFest 2009 I wanted to write a post about what went on, and how much I enjoyed it no matter how tiring it was. This was my second year and both years so far I have gotten really sick, last year I had to leave but this year I stayed because I was feeling better as the day progressed and I couldn't leave all the little junior roboticists! First I would like to say that both Gary and Scott are completely amazing people, it was obvious that they are two geeks who love this stuff and love seeing the kids amazed and happy throughout the course of the event, I think it's one of the main reasons they still put this event on (after 9 years.)
I held the "Vibrabot" workshop and my amazing and brilliant friends at HacDC had a booth this year (which I think went over really well, they are some serious hackers and makers) who showed off some of their projects and sold a lot of awesome electronic kits and components which I thought was awesome; More importantly it also spread the word about DC's only hackerspace! The Vibrabot workshop ended up being a huge success, I kind of had that idea after the response we had gotten by 10AM where pretty much all of the slots for the entire event were filled up already. At this point I was both excited and nervous, I knew that I wanted to make sure the kids had a great time because in my mind this was their first step into building a robot and could either progress or halt their love of electronics, it was a heavy burden.
The first class started, this was my first time teaching this workshop, a friend Adam Koeppel was originally planning to teach but could not make it. He was the one who came up with the design and had previously taught a workshop on the subject. As we started I think most of the kids were a little confused about what they had to do, which lessened with each class as instructions were made a little bit clearer, but after the initial 10 minute void we saw so many sparks of imagination light up the room and they started grabbing all the materials they could to design and build what they thought was the coolest built robot ever. It was amazing, we had the best voluteers this year (most of them seemed to come from Northrop Grumman, actually everyone except me I think worked there) and as soon as my introduction and explanation was over the volunteers and I had so much fun working with the kids and parents (who were sometimes "the kids") and helping them decide on what to build and the best route of doing so, it was amazing.
The vibrabot consists of a copper mesh frame (body), paperclips (arms/legs), a pager motor (vibration/movement) and a 3V button cell battery for power. This was the foundation but the class had so many options and abilities to use spare pager PCB's, components, decorations, springs and much more to design their bot. I will be posting some pictures I took during the class with my iPhone as I don't own a real camera, there were so many more pictures I wanted to take so hopefully I can get some from the organizers and crew.
By the end of each class, about 95% of the kids had a working robot, the other 5% were either too ambitious or ran out of time and were going to finish it at home, it was quite impressive. We ran through about 5 or 6 classes with a total of 70+ students throughout the day, not including parents. The organizers and volunteers had stripped down so many pagers and cut so much copper mesh and did an absolutely amazing job with setting up (because *ah hem* someone might have been a little late... sorry about that) the workshop I was thrilled, I think we killed an entire roll of electrical tape, 84 motors, a TON of batteries and enough feathers, glue and decorations to re-create Big Bird.
All-in-all it was an absolutely amazing event and I can't wait to start thinking about ideas for next year, I would like to teach a microcontroller class but I think the demographic is still a bit young so maybe using a graphical programming environment and some well known kits, we could do something a bit more advanced. We'll have to see come next April :).
Thank you so much to Gary, Scott and all the NG volunteers for allowing me to be a part of an amazing event and get to see so many happy children leave from a great class hopefully with a better understand of what is possible with so little, as long as you never lose your imagination.
