I’ve been helping out at Aber Robotics Club this year, which is a weekly after school club for local schoolkids. We got invited down to do a workshop in Pembrokeshire as part of “The Cheerful Project” who put on workshops in rural Pembrokeshire, so Steve filled his boot with Lego Mindstorms, got up early on a Saturday, met up with me and with Martin (our new institute schools outreach guy who doesn’t have a webpage yet) and we headed south to somewhere I’d never heard of. Whilst I’m not a huge fan of 7am starts on a Saturday, the weather was glorious and you can’t beat the coast road south of Aber for views. So it was feeling like a good day before we’d even got there.
Upon arrival we met the local organiser who filled us in on details about the people – mixed groups of adults and kids, with the youngest kid being 6, most kids 8-10 and a handful of teenagers. Perfect for lego. We decided to start off with a “programming” task though, with a humanoid robot that could only understand three commands (forwards, left and right) needing to perform a figure 8 path around some tables. The humanoid robot roles were played admirably by parents with blindfolds on. The next photo might look like some bizarre hostage situation but I assure you that it is a photo of a robot workshop.
Much to the kids’ amusement it turns out that the parents weren’t very good at following instructions blindfold. The exercise is a useful one to discuss robots, why they never do what you tell them to, and how you might program them. We also discussed sensors: the robots couldn’t see but it turns out they all navigated a little using sound, which is interesting.
We then got the kids building Lego robots, and once they were mostly done we broke for lunch, out the back of the hall. Quite a nice place to sit and eat some lovely food, provided by the Cheerful Project for us roboteers.
The kids then tethered the robots to our tablets, using Bluetooth, and remote controlled them. A few practice runs were carried out…
And then each of our junior roboteers piloted their own lego robot around the same figure 8 path that the “humanoid robot” had failed on earlier. To finish with we got all the roboteers in a circle and let them have a big robot fight. Because… why not eh? It’s fun.
All the kids seemed to really enjoy it, and I think most of the parents did too. As we were packing up one of the mums came in from the carpark to let us know that her kid had just said “this was the best day of my life!”. Which is the kind of feedback that it’s really nice to get.
Here’s Steve packing up the car.
We stopped for honey ice cream in Aberaeron on the way back too. Sometimes it is worth getting up at 7am on a Saturday.