OUTREACH

December 21, 2018

By Austin and Wenyu

We taught a group of young children the basics of design in not only robotics, but in other applications. We broke it down for them and taught them the process of brainstorming, sketching, and then how the sketch can be applied to the design. After teaching them the basic concepts, we gave them a fun activity (building a tower with marshmallows and toothpicks) to allow them to test out their newly learned design skills and learn how to work as a team because often, the design is the work of a team and not an individual. To end the lecture, we gave them a demonstration of using a CAD software to create a simple object to show them the power of a 3D model and how it could be applied to the building of a robot.

January 4, 2019

By Ben, Wenyu, and Austin

We taught another group of children for two hours. First, we discussed the essence of programming for robotics. We showed the students our code and gave them the general idea of it. We showed them how to write a program in Java.

After that, we showed the children a design website called tinkercad. We demonstrated how to design on three dimensions using tinkercad. We then showed them an example by designing a house on tinkercad.

Then, we let the children play around on what they were interested in, either the programming or the designing. The children who wanted to try out programming were able to create a simple Java file and write some code. The children who wanted to design were given an opportunity to design whatever they wanted on tinkercad.