By: Alexander Goldberg
As with every outreach event, the Bionic Bruins worked hard to bring an amazing Robotics exploration activity to Girl Scout troop 60113.
We used one of our classic activities for elementary and middle schoolers: building a DrawBot. The activity gave the scouts a chance to get creative by challenging them to build an attachment to an existing robot than can successfully hold a pen or marker. The best part? Kids need no prior knowledge of robots to have fun!
Because building a full wheelbase and robot in a short time is too challenging for young kids (and even seasoned builders) to handle, we used pre-built robots from earlier in the season. The requirements for these robots are pretty light- just a wheel base and remote-control capability, which every VEX competition robot has anyway.
But, even though most of the robot is already built, it isn’t a breeze to construct a solid pen holder. Students had plenty of resources to construct whatever they imagined.
Because we designed this activity to get kids thinking, they weren’t guided too heavily throughout the design or build process. We divided the scouts into small groups, gave them paper and pencils, and watched the fun begin!
Every group had a different approach, but with minimal guidance from our outreach team, the event was an amazing success.
The kids blew us away with all their unique designs, so we’ll definitely be doing this activity again– and not just because we got cookies!
