The Academy After Hours Spring 2016 is finally over! We had a great few weeks together starting in mid-March and finishing up just last week. A few highlights of this session include:
- A smaller class for more personal interactions
- Our second ever class with AAH in the Bergen County Academies
- Development of robot building skills
Overview
Throughout this year’s AAH Robotics Class, we saw much improvement with building
skills. We had a class of only 8 people, so we were able to reinforce important building techniques like usage of black pegs as well as the simplicity of a build. One of the best aspects of this season’s class was the willingness of each student to attempt things that they were not exposed to previously. We enjoyed seeing our students think of innovative ways to retrieve loops or attack other robots in the SumoBot competition that we held at the end of our class. One of our students decided to attempt to spin quickly to attack other robots as well as prevent them from pushing themselves.
In addition, our class was able to learn the use of many sensors in their program, including some sensors that we saw in the SumoBot battle, like ultrasonic, color, and touch sensors. We learned how to use these sensors in our programs, mostly by moving until a wait block was triggered by a sensor.
Next Steps
We hope to host another robotics session in the fall of 2016 with AAH again. In this program, we hope to focus more on programming and introduce better methods of organizing and understanding the logic that goes into the creation of a viable program as we saw some students slightly confused by the programming process of their robots in this class.
In addition, we would like to expand our class selection. Right now, we are open to middle schoolers for our robotics class. However, we would like to cater to younger and older audiences by creating more advanced classes and easier introduction classes.
Overall, this AAH robotics class was another successful learning experience, for both the kids and the teachers involved. We hope to see you in one of our classes next year!