As the four students in the robotics class work through coding challenges and elaborate designs, they are also creating something greater than their robots: problem-solving skills. Each day they overcome obstacles through trial and error to manufacture their own masterpiece.
The class is taught by Adam Schwaninger, and this is his first year of teaching the course. At the start of the year, the students began by building a robot with instructions and then followed the set of challenges that were provided. They all work individually now, but, later on, they may do a few projects together.
At first, students learned to “drive” their robots, pick up objects and move things around with a controller. After they get the feel of it, coding began to come into play.
“As we move forward they are going to start being creative and solving problems,” Schwaninger said. “[By] building challenges that do not have instructions.”
The upcoming project that the robotics class will take on is creating and using a launcher. This time though, they will not be provided with a set of instructions. Instead, they will have to figure out how to make their robot launch items on their own.
“[The hardest part is] trial and error, you just got to do one thing, try it out, fix what did not work and just do that over again,” junior Miles Cradduck said. “It is a really relaxed class. Do your thing and talk.”
When putting the code in, it sometimes does not always work out perfectly, especially when transferring the code over to the robot. Schwaninger said that when typing the code into the computer, it always works flawlessly, but when it gets transmitted to the robot it may not consistently match up. In the computer, the code may tell the robot to turn 45º to the left but once it is coded into the robot it may only turn 43º.
“You have to kind of adjust and then like make repairs, make sure your build is correct,” Schwaninger said. “There are just a lot of other little details that come into play when you are coding an actual moving physical object than just coding on a computer.”
With the small number of students in the class, they said they all enjoy their time with one another creating and letting their imagination work together to make new robots. Junior James Laframboise said that his favorite part of the class is Schwaninger and that he is pretty cool.
The class uses BEX Robotics and participates in the company’s annual competitions. This may alter the way that Schwaninger will teach the class in the future so that way the students can get higher up into robotics. If they advance, they can then choose to compete in the competitions that BEX Robotics holds.
As they continue to code and make new robots, the students also evolve as people. Robotics teaches students things that are taught in no other classroom: a solid foundation in technology, innovation and problem-solving.
